Vernost'
by Alice-in-chucks
Summary: His doctor just wants him to take a getaway and learn how to relax, but when he arrives in America what he gets instead is a sketchy Russian redhead and a man who seems to think he's his dead best friend.
1. Chapter 1

The light that had been pouring in through the little rectangular window was gone. Sasha wasn't sure at what point his view had darkened from hazy ocean and wispy clouds to this blackness, but it must have been quite some time ago. Most of the other passengers on the plane were in some level of unconsciousness, and he knew he should be trying to get some shut-eye, too, but, well. Sleep didn't exactly come easily to him under normal circumstances, and especially not when he couldn't even lie down.

He figured it was just as well that the window had gone black; it had been something of a strain to see out of anyway, from the aisle seat. His desire to be in a prime position to spend his flight gazing out the window had been outweighed by his utter unwillingness to be trapped in a seat where there would be two whole seats filled with people blocking him from the closest escape route. That was definitely not an option, so he took his partial view of the sky without too much inner grumbling.

He took a few deep breaths, the kind that he knew were supposed to be calming, and closed his eyes. He wasn't surprised when his muscles refused to relax. Wasn't that the whole point of this trip, anyway? A doctor-ordered vacation to try and get Sasha to unwind and destress, away from Moscow and his routine. America might not have been Sasha's first choice destination, but his therapist seemed to have some weird fixation on Lake George and must have thought he could live vicariously through his patient by sending him there.

Sasha really wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with so much free time, but he guessed he'd have to figure that out when he got there.

Right now he was really, really tired. There were still several more hours until they got to JFK, and he just wanted to _sleep_ , dammit. He sighed and glanced over at his two seat-mates to make sure they were asleep before pulling out his phone and opening up YouTube. He might have been cajoled into telling his therapist the only semi-effective way he'd found of getting to sleep, but that didn't mean he wanted the whole world to know.

The channel he watched most often—okay, pretty much the _only_ channel that worked for him even halfway consistently—had a new video uploaded. It was a longer one, a little over an hour, and Sasha silently thanked the airline for high-speed Wifi and tapped the video's thumbnail, slipping his ear buds in.

This time whoever ran the channel was drawing a scene of a train snaking its way through the countryside. Sasha wouldn't have been able to tell, since the whole screen started out just a blank canvas, except that the guy who narrated the videos as he drew seemed to like spoiling the surprise and telling you exactly what he was planning to do before he did it. Not that Sasha minded too much. The guy's voice, aside from the almost hypnotically smooth movements of pen or pencil across the paper, was ridiculously calming and was probably more than half the reason his videos helped Sasha relax enough to sleep.

Apparently it was a specific train, not just a generic one, so the voice filled the listener in on a bit of its history as he drew. It took a little while, but Sasha could feel the tension in his back start to ease slightly as he listened to the soothing English and then he was blinking at a finished sketch of the countryside, steel rails gracefully making their way through the grass. It was a really nice picture, actually. It took a moment for Sasha to realize the voice had gone silent in his ear and YouTube was asking if he wanted to watch the next video. He must have fallen asleep.

He tapped 'cancel' and closed the app, hoping his current groggy state would allow him to drift off again, but no such luck. He could feel the familiar tension returning to his body already, so he grudgingly unlocked his phone again to check the time. 03:07. Not too long til landing.

* * *

3:07 am. Not too long til landing. Steve pocketed his phone for the hundredth time, knowing he would take it out again in probably less than a minute. Could he help it if he was anxious to make sure his friend arrived back in America safely? He knew Nat would roll her eyes if she could see him fidgeting outside the international arrivals. Hell, he wouldn't be surprised if she was rolling her eyes right now, wherever in the sky she was, somehow knowing that Steve was acting stupid on her behalf. He hoped it would be at least a somewhat understanding eye-roll, though. For all her feigned nonchalance, he knew Nat was at least as protective as he was of their friends.

He perked up as the beginnings of a new flood of people came through the gate, but no, it was still a bit too early for it to be Natasha's flight. A moment later he recognized the military uniforms of the new arrivals. Oh. Right. There was a big welcome for the troops coming in at this gate that morning, too.

The people around him began to cheer, some of them waving signs they'd made for this occasion, and Steve smiled slightly as some rushed forward to greet their spouses, their siblings, children, and friends. It was touching, really.

It had been a long time since Steve had stopped scanning crowds like these for a familiar face. He wasn't an idiot, wasn't in denial, knew he wouldn't see one. The condolence letter regarding Sergeant James Barnes had come when Steve wasn't even legal drinking age, and a good few years had passed since then. But could he help it if seeing stuff like this still made his chest a little tighter, if other people's joy still gave him a little twinge of pain?

He checked his phone again. The flight from Moscow was due in another ten minutes or so. He did his best not to fidget through those minutes.

His chest eased as finally, finally, he spotted familiar red hair coming smoothly through the gate. He stood and moved toward her. Her eyes found him immediately, of course, and a corner of her mouth quirked up.

She let him give her a hug when he got to her. "Flight go okay?"

She nodded. "They gave me food, so yeah."

"They know how to please. How about the rest of your trip?" he asked, taking her suitcase. She gave him a look but didn't protest.

"It was nice. I'll tell you more later, right now I just kinda want to get out of here. Food or no, red-eyes are not really my favorite."

"Understandable. Come on, I'm parked over here." He turned to lead them toward the exit closest to where he'd parked when a flash of movement caught the corner of his sight, like someone had done a double-take. He glanced over and sure enough, a guy was staring at him, a guy who actually looked a lot like—

A loud _smack_ startled Steve and he jumped before looking down to see that he'd dropped Nat's suitcase.

He could feel Nat's gaze on him, not that he was looking, since once he'd determined the source of the loud noise his eyes had immediately snapped back to the guy who was pointedly not looking at him now, the barest hint of a laugh in his eyes, eyes that looked like—

"Bucky?"

No, _more_ than looked like, this wasn't just some vague resemblance. Those eyes were Bucky's.

But— _how_?

The guy who was but wasn't Bucky—because he couldn't _possibly_ be, right? His eyes were just playing tricks on him because he'd been thinking about that crowd of soldiers coming home, or something—looked back at him again, and shit, had Steve just spoken out loud? Belatedly he heard the echo of his own breathy question in his mind and realized that yes, he had.

Bucky's (not Bucky's?) brow was wrinkling in confusion. He glanced around a little warily before asking, "Are you talking to me?"

And his voice both was and wasn't Bucky's, too. His accent sounded like he'd come straight from—well, from Moscow. Which, of course, he had. He was a good few inches shorter than Steve, too, which threw him off a bit, but Steve was the one who'd changed in that case. He'd already been catching up to Bucky by the time he left for Iraq.

Steve could feel Natasha's hand on his arm but he ignored it, because he wasn't actually going crazy, right? The guy had been staring at him first, after all.

"Yeah," Steve answered his question, "you know me, don't you?"

Natasha's hand tightened on his arm and he could tell she was about to say something, but Bucky beat her to it.

"Steve, right?"

* * *

Shit. Why did he say that? This guy obviously thought he was someone he knew, and now Sasha had just gone and confirmed it, when in reality he knew nothing about this guy except that he had a talent for drawing and a voice that could calm a hurricane. When he'd first heard him talking to his red-haired friend there, it had nearly sent Sasha reeling, because he would know that voice _anywhere_ , had literally heard that voice almost every night before he went to sleep, as creepy as that sounded when he actually thought it in words.

Why, why, why had he said his name? Just because Sasha knew that the channel he watched was called SteveGRogers did _not_ mean that he knew the guy, and now he'd have to pretend that he did (which he wouldn't be able to keep up for long) or admit that he watched him draw more nights than not.

Great. Just great.

"Steve," Steve's friend was saying, and Sasha looked at her mainly as a way to avoid looking at Steve's expression, which was quickly morphing into something painfully hopeful and almost comically confused at once. His friend's voice was low but forceful. "Something's not right here. Let's go."

"But—"

"He doesn't know you, Steve. And I don't think you know him."

"You know me, you know my name," Steve said insistently, addressing Sasha rather than his friend. For one wild moment, he wondered if it could be true, if this stranger might actually know who he was. But how could he? He was an American. If there was one thing Sasha'd never doubted, it was that he was Russian born and bred. The only Americans he'd dealt with were strictly on assignment, and Sasha didn't recognize this guy from any assignment. Y _our own memory is hardly the most reliable authority_ , a niggling thought reminded him quietly, but he pushed it aside.

The redhead offered him a small, polite smile. "Excuse my friend, he's a little loopy on medications."

"Don't worry about it," Sasha answered mildly, a bit dazed by all of it.

"What did you say to him?" Steve asked, confusing Sasha even more, until he saw that Steve was staring between them helplessly, a little accusingly even, and he realized Steve's friend had spoken to him in Russian and he had answered in kind automatically.

"I'm Natasha, what's your name?" she asked, in English this time, extending her hand. He reached out to take it, thankful not for the first time that his prosthetic was his left.

"Aleksander. Or Sasha, more often."

* * *

Steve was shaking his head before he realized it, because for all his Russian accent and longer hair, there was no way Bucky had a doppelganger who not only looked but _sounded_ like him, and knew Steve's name. But Nat was right, there was something definitely off here. Besides the fact that Bucky was apparently calling himself Sasha, the way he said Steve's name was not the way you'd greet your best friend after years. At best it was the way you'd greet someone you vaguely remembered running into in high school a few times and felt obligated to make small talk with.

Bucky—Sasha?—was speaking again. "I'm sorry, I think you must have mistaken me for someone else. I don't actually know who either of you are." He sounded apologetic.

"How did you know my name?" Steve insisted. Bucky—he resigned himself to the fact that he probably wasn't going to be able to think of him by any other name—actually winced.

"You—your friend said it," he mumbled, gesturing towards Natasha. Steve glanced at her. Had she? It would have been a logical explanation, except for that fact that Bucky wouldn't meet either of their eyes. Natasha's eyes were narrowed. She didn't believe him either. Why would Bucky lie about that, though? Was it possible that he really did remember Steve, and for some reason thought he couldn't let them know?

Steve wasn't sure what the implications of that would be, but he tried not to let his heart run wild with hope.

"Oh, right. Of course," Nat said easily, expression returning to neutral. Whatever Bucky's reasoning, she seemed willing to let it drop for now.

Bucky looked back up at them, shoulders relaxing minutely. "Who do I look like?" he asked curiously.

Steve studied his face, looking for any sign of something other than curiosity. Was it possible that he was detecting a bit of hope in his eyes? Along with… not quite fear, but something close. Wariness, maybe.

"An old friend," he answered.

Bucky nodded slowly, once, and then again. None of them spoke for a moment, then Bucky ventured, "A dead friend?"

Steve sucked in a slow breath, desperately wanting to know what was going on in his head. Was Bucky a dead friend? Or a friend who'd somehow been falsely reported dead and was now standing in front of him? Steve just didn't know what to believe, and if he didn't get some answers soon he thought he might just tear in two.

Bucky must have taken his silence for confirmation, because he nodded again. "You looked like you were seeing a ghost," he offered by way of explanation.

Steve sent a look toward Natasha that he hoped said, _you know I can't just let this go, right?_ which she returned by flattening her mouth in a resigned way that he knew meant, _I know._

* * *

Steve turned back to Sasha after his silent conversation with his friend. "Look, I know you probably have somewhere to be…but..." He trailed off uncertainly. Sasha took pity and jumped in.

"I don't, actually." The words surprised even him for a moment, and he wasn't sure how to say _I feel like for some reason I need to stay with you, tug on this thread, because you're the first people who've looked at me like I might actually be worth taking notice of_ , without sounding a little... well.

Steve looked even more surprised than he was. "Yeah?"

Sasha fidgeted with the strap on his backpack, unable to meet that hopeful gaze. "Does someone want to show me someplace to get a decent breakfast around here?"


	2. Chapter 2

"You are Russian, Natalya?" Sasha asked as the three of them made their way through the streets of Queens.

"Yes. And it's Natasha, unless you'd like me to call you Aleksander?"

"You may call me whatever you like."

She gave him a sidelong look. "Alright then, Sanya."

"Natashenka," he shot back. She only narrowed her eyes in response, and Sasha decided to count it as a victory. Steve had been quiet since they'd left the airport, but he kept looking over at Sasha as if he thought he might have disappeared since he'd last looked. Sasha supposed it was understandable, considering his apparent strong resemblance to his long lost dead friend.

"Do you live near Moscow?" he continued.

"I live here," Natalya answered. "In Midtown. What about you?"

"Moscow."

"How long have you lived there?" Sasha tried not to take it as an interrogation. This was what people made small talk about, right?

"A little over a year," he answered. It wasn't exactly true, but that was neither here nor there.

"Oh? And before that?" Natalya's tone was casual, but then she couldn't have known about the paranoia that Sasha had to talk himself through on a daily basis.

"I moved around," he said vaguely.

Natalya shared another aggravating look with Steve before they arrived at their apparent destination, Nana's Nook, a little place attached to the best clam bar in Howard Beach, according to Natalya. Sasha wasn't sure if the all the different neighborhoods in NYC were more confusing than Moscow's districts or if it was just the fact that he wasn't used to them.

He wasn't about to trust his companions to choose a table, so he picked up his pace a bit and entered before them, settling himself in a seat near a side exit that was facing out toward the rest of the room. Natalya sat herself next to him, also facing the room at large, and Steve sat across from the two of them.

"Nice place," he commented lightly, opening the menu. "What's good?"

"Everything," Natalya said, "although I do recommend the Guatemala Finca coffee."

They ordered, a stack of pancakes for Sasha, frittata for Natalya, and some kind of eggs for Steve. Sasha looked at Steve, who was frowning at his closed menu and trying to pretend he wasn't fidgeting.

"I can tell you're just dying to say something, Steve," he said dryly, hoping to mask his own discomfort.

Steve's gaze flew up to meet his, looking a bit cornered, and he asked, "Were you in the military?"

Sasha's grip on the seat of his chair tightened infinitesimally, because technically the FSB was military, and technically, he had been in the regular armed forces before that. But the Armed Forces at least weren't secretive. Not much, anyway. He forced his hand to relax.

"Yeah, I was."

Sasha wasn't sure what the look on Steve's face meant, but Natalya spoke before he had time to think about it too much. "He means the US military."

His brow puckered in confusion. "What? No. Why would I serve in the US military?"

Natalya looked down at the table as Steve continued to look at him with that unfathomable expression, and Sasha realized what it was he'd been missing. "You… you don't think I _am_ your dead friend, do you?"

Steve at least had the courtesy to look a little embarrassed. "I'm sorry, this is probably the weirdest conversation you've ever had."

Sasha barked out a laugh. "You'd be surprised."

"Steve," Natalya said quietly. "A word."

Steve's face looked strained, but he obligingly followed Natalya to the hallway leading to the bathrooms. They were too far away for Sasha to overhear, as Natalya had obviously intended, so he read their lips.

 _Are you sure you know what you're doing?_ she asked.

 _I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's_ Bucky-

 _You're sure it's him?_ Natalya was looking at her friend like whatever he said on the subject, she would take as the absolute truth.

Steve sighed. _I know it doesn't make any sense._ He glanced over towards the table and Sasha stared resolutely at the couple dining a few tables down.

He looked back over in time to see Natalya nod. _So it's him. Either he's lying to us or he really doesn't know who he used to be, and if he doesn't know, Steve, this could really mess him up. He could be living a normal life in Moscow-_

 _What am I supposed to do, Natasha?_

Natalya sighed in defeat before finishing the sentence Steve had interrupted. _But, whatever his life has been since you last saw him, I doubt it's been entirely normal, considering he's been reading our lips this whole time._

Sasha snapped his eyes to the waitress who was blessedly coming over with their food just as Steve looked over at him again in surprise. Natalya hadn't looked at him once, yet she had seen what Steve hadn't. He'd have to be careful around her.

They came back to the table, thanking the waitress for their food. The three of them started in on their breakfasts quietly, if a bit awkwardly.

"So, Sasha," Natalya broke the silence after several moments. "What brings you to America?"

Doctor's orders. But he could hardly say that; he didn't want them to think he was crazy on top of everything else. "Vacation."

"Oh? You got family back home?"

That seemed like an abrupt subject change, and he was instantly on edge. A person without family was suspicious. A person without family could disappear and it wouldn't matter. "Yeah, my mother lives in a suburb of Moscow, and I have a few aunts and uncles nearby," he said casually, falling back into his old legend.

"Ah, no wife and kids, then? Didn't need to get a nursemaid?" Was Sasha just imagining that she put a little more than the necessary emphasis on that last word, having been immersed too long in the slang of espionage? Did people even use the word nursemaid in ordinary conversation? Was she trying to determine if that was the reason he was overseas, to make sure some dignitary didn't form any dangerous associations with foreigners? But that didn't make sense, Sasha hadn't come with any delegations or touring groups, and Natalya should have seen that much in the airport.

Or what if _she_ was the nursemaid, and she was here to keep an eye on him on his medical leave, and Steve was the foreigner, the distraction, the test, and Sasha had failed by agreeing to come talk with him, by admitting that he'd been in the military-

Sasha had already bolted out the door by the time he realized none of that made sense either; Sasha himself had never had a nursemaid assigned to him, if not because he was hardly ever abroad, then because he wasn't important enough to bother with. And of course there was the slightly more important matter that there couldn't be any officer to make sure he didn't defect, there was nowhere to defect from, because he wasn't an agent. Not anymore. He reeled himself back in from his paranoid train of thought to find himself in an unknown alley. Not that there was any possibility of being in a _known_ alley, around here.

A moment later two heads of blond and red hair rounded the corner. When Natalya spotted him, she slowed, holding her hands up in front of her as a sign of harmlessness. Steve continued to rush until he was a few feet away from Sasha, then stopped himself short. "Buck-"

"I apologize," Natalya interrupted, "It was a poor choice of words on my part." She didn't deny that she was aware what effect her choice of words might have had on him. Maybe she wasn't Russian intelligence, but she could still be American intelligence, posing as a Russian, ready to prosecute him for his actions against her country, and _why_ had he agreed to come to America of all places? Hell, maybe she wasn't even posing and she was a Russian defector. Whatever she was, he couldn't let his guard down.

* * *

"What the hell is going on, Natasha?" One second Nat had been giving Bucky her own strange form of small talk/interrogation, the next Steve knew Bucky was out of the restaurant in a flash. Natasha had had the weird presence of mind to leave a folded bill on the table as she followed him out, which Steve guessed he was grateful for since he definitely hadn't been able to think of anything but Bucky's hunted expression.

"I'm sorry, I didn't even really mean anything by it, I guess he's even more paranoid than I thought," Natasha said before they rounded a corner and saw Bucky standing in the alley, looking lost and breathing hard.

"Buck-" the name escaped his mouth before he could stop himself.

"I apologize," Natasha was saying, her hands raised in front of her. "It was a poor choice of words on my part." What choice of words had even set him off? Something about getting a nursemaid? Steve knew he was missing a lot here and he was honestly tired of it.

"Who the hell are you?" Bucky asked.

"Probably not whoever you're thinking of," Nat said, coming to a stop next to Steve.

Bucky was shaking his head, hard, almost as if he wasn't entirely aware of the action. "I won't cooperate, I don't know anything, I swear."

"Jumpy, aren't you?" Nat mused wryly.

"I'm not with them, anyway, you've got your intelligence wrong."

"Not with who?"

Bucky stopped shaking his head and seemed to come back to himself a little. "Anyone. Depends who you work for."

The corner of Natasha's mouth quirked. "Well, that's funny, because I teach ballet."

He let out a harsh laugh, and Steve couldn't tell if he believed her or not. "I bet they love you."

"They do," Natasha said. "What about you? Who do you work for?"

Bucky looked at her evenly and said, "I teach kids how to beat the shit out of each other."

"They like you?"

He snorted lightly. "No."

Natasha finally put her hands down, resting them on her hips. "Well, we're both obviously avoiding talking about our pasts."

Steve felt like he was maybe, finally catching up. Was Bucky some kind of Russian spy like Natasha had been?

"We're not here to hurt you, Buck," he said calmly. Surprisingly, Bucky's shoulders seemed to relax a bit at that, even as he said,

"That's not my name."

Right. It kept slipping out. "Sasha," he corrected himself. "We're not going to take you in anywhere, or report anything to anyone."

Bucky took a deep breath.

"I'm guessing you got out recently?" Natasha asked, gently by her standards. Bucky didn't respond. "You remind me of myself when I first came in from the cold."

Steve thought her words would be reassuring, but Bucky bristled, every muscle that had been beginning to relax tightening up again. Was every little thing Natasha said calculated to extract some sort of nonverbal information from Bucky? He wondered if she understood something from that reaction that he didn't. It hurt to see Bucky so defensive, and Steve just wanted to remove some of that tension. He took a step forward to place a gentle hand on Bucky's shoulder, moving slowly so that Bucky could clearly see what he was doing.

He didn't even feel Bucky move, but next thing he knew he was on his knees with what felt like an iron vice around his throat, and God, was the glove Bucky wore armored or something?

It dimly registered that Natasha had a gun to Bucky's head, but the standoff ended almost as soon as it had started, Bucky releasing Steve's neck with a strangled sound as if _he_ was the one who'd just had the breath choked out of him.

Steve took in a ragged gulp of air, his hand going to his throat. So, that hadn't been one of his best ideas. But Natasha hadn't lowered her gun, and he realized Bucky was staring at him, eyes wide and panicked. When he spoke his voice was painfully raw.

"Steve?"

Steve straightened immediately. Was he going crazy or was there recognition in that word, in those fearful eyes? "Bucky?" he asked cautiously.

Bucky's eyes flicked to Natasha's gun, which she still didn't seem inclined to move anytime soon. "Steve, what's going on?" There was barely enough time for Steve to register that all traces of his Russian accent were gone, replaced by familiar Brooklyn, before Bucky let out another strangled sound and clutched at his head with his left arm, twisting at the same time to cradle said arm with his right.

Steve was on his feet in an instant. "Buck, what's wrong?" he asked briskly. His only answer was labored breathing accompanied by a low groan. Steve batted Natasha's gun away, which she allowed, but kept it still in her hand, held down near her thigh. She watched them both, expression cautious.

Steve hovered, wary of touching him again but not sure what else to do, either. Bucky was clearly in pain, his face screwed up and body doubled over, one hand still clutching at his head. A desperate glance at Natasha confirmed that she wasn't sure how to handle the situation, either.

They both watched as Bucky retched, the breakfast that he'd managed to eat coming up to land on the concrete. Natasha's eyes slid over to where a bit of it had gotten on Steve's shoes, but that seemed hardly important right now. Several strands of hair had come loose from Bucky's bun to fall in front of his face, and Steve wanted to sweep them out of the way of his vomit-stained mouth, but he still wasn't sure what might set him off. Hands in his face probably would not be welcome.

But a closer look at Bucky's face made him wonder if he would even notice such a thing. He'd stopped clutching at his head and arm, and his expression seemed almost calm, if a bit distant. He was breathing easier now, as if all the pain had been expelled with the vomit.

"Bucky," Steve said. Bucky made no sign that he heard him.

"Sasha," said Nat. Steve tried not to feel relieved when that produced no response, either. She said something in Russian that sounded like a question. Still nothing. Steve moved into his line of sight, but it was like Bucky was staring through him.

"What the hell did they do to you, Buck?" he muttered. And who were 'they', anyway?

"Well, we can't leave him here."

Steve raised his eyebrows at Natasha. That was obvious.

"Does it count as abduction if it's your amnesiac dead best friend?" she mused.

"Pretty sure. Does it matter?"

She smirked in response.

"Do you wanna risk touching him this time, or…" He didn't want a repeat of a few minutes ago, even though Steve hadn't actually touched him, just got close to it, but he figured if anyone could handle a surprise attack by Bucky it would be a former spy.

Natasha walked a few paces back the way they'd come, expression considering. She barked out something in Russian. Steve had never given more than a passing thought to learning the language, but now he found himself for the third time in a single day wishing that he had. Whatever she'd said, Bucky finally seemed to hear, because he straightened slightly and walked toward her.

"What'd you say?"

"I told him to follow me." She raised an eyebrow. "Do you always follows orders, or only ones given in Russian?" Bucky, to no one's terrible surprise, said nothing.

"Or maybe only ones given by beautiful women carrying guns," Steve offered. "Well, lead the way then. We'll take him to Sam's, at least til he snaps out of this."

Natasha nodded. Sam's apartment was quite a bit closer than the building Steve and Nat both lived in. Steve's car was still at the airport, but he could swing back there later, no problem. Nat turned and walked away, and sure enough, Bucky followed. Steve tried not to be unnerved by the not-quite-there look in Bucky's eyes, and trailed after them.

* * *

A/N: A nursemaid is a term used in Russian espionage to mean a security agent who is sent to accompany delegations to other countries to prevent anyone from defecting or forming dangerous associations with foreigners


	3. Chapter 3

Cheers for a longer chapter!

* * *

The ceiling was white and low, quite a bit lower than the one in Sasha's apartment. Whatever he was lying on felt too soft to be his sofa, too. He fought to keep his breathing even, to not alert whoever might be in the room that he was awake until he figured out where exactly he was.

He must have tensed involuntarily, though—of course he did, Sasha thought bitterly—because he heard a female voice drawl, "Well, look who decided to join the land of the living."

He eased himself upright, heart pounding but keeping his face as neutral as possible. No way he was going to let whoever it was know he was afraid.

A small woman with straight red hair was curled up in a cushioned chair facing the sofa, a book resting on her legs. A tall, strong-looking man leaned against the wall next to her chair, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched Sasha intently. At the sound of the woman's voice another man entered from an area that might have been the kitchen.

It took a moment, but names and associations came to attach themselves to these faces in Sasha's vision. Natalya, or Natasha, the one with all the questions. Steve, the one with the dead friend. The second man wasn't familiar.

Remembering who these people were didn't exactly put him any more at ease.

"Where am I?" he asked. Steve's jaw tightened and Natalya sent him a sympathetic look. Now what was that about?

"You're in my apartment." It was the unfamiliar man who spoke. "Sam Wilson, nice to meet you."

"Was I… asleep?"

"Not exactly," Sam said. "Do you remember how you got here?"

Sasha thought about it. They'd been at the restaurant, Sasha had freaked out, they'd followed him, Steve had moved to attack him and Sasha reacted. After that it became a little hazy, but he could dimly remember following Natalya here, laying down on this sofa like he was crashing in his friend's living room or something. Why had he done that?

"I think so," he said.

"Good, that's good." Sam nodded encouragingly. "Would you mind telling me what you remember?"

The way he asked reminded Sasha of his therapist. He glanced at Natalya. "I followed her here."

"That's right. Why did you follow her here?"

"I guess…" He tried to remember. "I guess because she told me to?"

"Does Natasha have authority over you in any way?"

"Of course not," Sasha answered automatically.

"Then why would you feel obliged to do what she told you?" Sam's voice was gentle.

Sasha scowled. "What are you, some kind of psychiatrist?"

"Some kind," Sam nodded. "Is that alright?"

What kind of question was that? "Are you asking my permission to be a psychiatrist?"

"I'm asking your permission to help you figure out what just happened," he answered patiently.

Sasha turned to Steve and Natalya incredulously. "You brought in a psychiatrist?"

"Nah, he just lives here," Steve said.

Sasha sighed, deciding the easiest course of action would be to play along with whatever game this seemed to be. He tried to remember what had been going through his head when Natalya had barked the order to follow. It was like trying to remember a foggy dream he'd been snatched out of the middle of into wakefulness, the edges of it fading rapidly. "I guess… I wasn't thinking very clearly, and she sounded like…" he trailed off. They'd already guessed he'd been an agent. It wouldn't hurt to say what he'd been thinking, would it?

"Who did she sound like?"

"Not her voice or anything," he tried to explain. "I mean, she didn't sound like a specific person or something like that. I guess it was mainly her tone, and I just kind of assumed she was a handler or an officer or whatever."

Sam nodded like that made sense and turned to Natalya. "And you knew that would work?"

"Not exactly," Natalya admitted. "Just a hunch. If Sasha's experience as an agent was anything like mine, he's been conditioned to follow orders without questioning them. When I first came in, I did everything Clint told me, because I didn't understand that he wasn't just a new handler. He caught on pretty quick and helped me work through it, but it took a while to completely condition it out of myself." She twisted her mouth and Sasha got the sense that it made her a bit uncomfortable to talk about this. "I know the situation is different and I'm no handler, but I figured that Sasha wasn't really in the best headspace to make that call. Turned out I was right."

"Speaking of the headspace you were in," Sam said, taking a seat on the armrest of Natalya's chair and turning back to Sasha. "Steve and Nat tell me you were spaced-out and unresponsive. Do you remember what happened before that?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Sasha could see Steve straighten slightly, as if this answer was important to him. Sasha looked right at him as he answered, "He tried to attack me."

Steve stared back. "That's not what happened."

The memory was surprisingly clear considering how hazy everything got after that, of Steve moving to grab his shoulder, somewhat slowly as if getting ready to restrain a spooked animal. Why else would he have made a grab at his shoulder? Sasha wasn't an idiot, knew at least in theory if not from much experience that people made physical contact with their friends and didn't always try to hurt them, but he and Steve weren't… Oh. Oh. He kept forgetting that maybe Steve didn't realize that they weren't friends, that he might still be clinging on to the notion that Sasha was this Bucky person.

He looked away from those piercing blue eyes.

"And then what?" Sam prompted.

"I… reacted. I guess I overreacted," he muttered. Again.

"You nearly choked him out," Sam said. "Pretty impressive, by the way, I'd've liked to've seen that." Steve made an indignant noise in his throat. "Oh, come on, tough guy, you came out all right." Sam addressed Sasha again. "But in future, we'll try to give you your space, and you could maybe not try to kill us? That sound like an okay deal to you?"

In future. God, he was never going to make it to Lake George, was he? He had a reservation, dammit. "Am I a prisoner?"

"No," Sam said carefully. "You're free to go, if you really want to. But I get the feeling that you want to get this sorted out, too. If there's someone expecting you, you can call them or do whatever you need to take care of."

Sasha glowered. There was no one expecting him, but he wasn't about to tell them that. "What's there to get sorted?"

"Well, there's the fact that something happened to make you dissociate the hell away from your surroundings, and I'd like to find out what exactly that was. Now what happened after you grabbed Steve by the throat?"

He frowned. "Then… Natalya told me to follow her. I… I must have let him go, before that."

A _thump_ and Sasha was on his feet in an instant, heart pounding. He searched the room wildly for the source of the sound, but nothing seemed amiss. Was there something next door? Then he noticed that Steve had his fist clenched and pressed tightly against the wall behind him, his back still up against it.

Had he just… punched the wall?

"Easy," said Sam, and Sasha wasn't sure if he was talking to him or Steve.

"You remembered." Steve sounded like he was trying and failing to keep his tone even. "You remembered who you were for a minute, and you were confused, but I could see it, I could _hear_ it in your voice. You were… you remembered."

Remembered who he was? Was he saying Sasha had remembered being who Steve thought he was, this Bucky guy in the American military? What the hell? That didn't make any kind of sense… it didn't make any kind of sense, right? That niggling voice butted in again, reminding him that he didn't know, couldn't know for sure, had that big gaping void where most people had a childhood. But Sasha knew who he was, even if he didn't remember a lot of it, a Russian trained from youth to be one of the country's finest snipers. He'd always known that, ever since he'd been rescued from that camp in Chechnya where they'd fucked his head up so bad he'd lost his childhood and half his training.

The look on Steve's face was almost pleading. It was hard to look at.

"And then you threw up," said Natalya. "Look, some of it's still on Steve's shoes."

Sasha looked. That… that would explain the nasty taste in his mouth.

"Aw, man," Sam complained. "You come into my home at four in the morning, dump a dude on my couch, didn't even bring me breakfast, and you've got puke on your shoes."

Sasha swallowed. "Why don't I remember that?"

Sam leaned forward, elbows on his thighs and hands loosely clasped between his knees. "Well, from what these guys tell me it sounds like as soon as you started to remember your body reacted against it and you were in a lot of pain. I don't know what was going on for sure, but if I had to guess I'd say the retrograde amnesia was your brain trying to protect you from the trauma and stress of remembering something so deeply repressed."

The weird thing was that that almost made sense, if brains actually worked like that, which he guessed Sam would know better than him. Hell, even if they normally didn't, Sasha wouldn't be too surprised if his messed up brain pulled some shit like that. He was a little afraid to consider the possibility that they might be right about who he was, though, and he had to remind himself that Natalya was, or had been, an agent, regardless of whatever she claimed to do now. She could have gotten some random pseudo-doctor to spout mumbo jumbo to get him to trust them or something, although he couldn't really fathom what kind of plan she could have. He just couldn't get her words from the alleyway out of his head. _You remind me of myself when I first came in from the cold._ That was such a Western phrase.

"Has anything like this happened to you before?" Sam asked. "Any weird gaps in your memory, ending up in places and not knowing how you got there, things like that? And I'm not talking about times that can be explained away by being a little too soaked in vodka." Natalya smirked.

Had anything like this happened before? It had. It had.

Sasha shook his head, because he was nothing if not good at avoiding things he didn't like talking about. "I don't know. I don't think so...? Would I know if it had?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

He sat down again, splaying his hands over his thighs to keep them from shaking. "Tell me about this Bucky guy."

* * *

Bucky, or James Buchanan Barnes, as it turned out was his full name, sounded like a good, stand-up American guy, the way Steve told it. Of course he was. He'd been a boxer and a star student and always had Steve's back when they were growing up, which it sounded like Steve needed. Apparently Steve hadn't always been the well-built man standing before Sasha, had suffered from asthma and heart problems and a weak immune system and yet still insisted on fighting a chair if it looked at him funny. It had been for these health reasons that he hadn't been able to join Bucky in enlisting in the army like he'd wanted to. Bucky's parents had both died by the time he was eighteen, his mother to sickness and his father to an accident years later, so he stayed with Steve and his mother for a while. Being unable to afford college and not wanting to remain a burden to Steve and his mom was a big reason Bucky had enlisted, Steve suspected. Along with his Good Ol' American patriotism, Sasha filled in silently. He searched for any deeply repressed sorrow at hearing about the fate of the Barnes, but all he could think was how convenient it was that the guy didn't have any close surviving relatives.

Before Steve had started in on his little biography, Sasha had been sure to let them all know that just because he had asked about Bucky didn't mean he believed he was who they thought he was, but as Steve recounted robotically how half of Bucky's regiment had been taken captive in Iraq, he couldn't help his heart starting to beat a little faster. So Bucky's story ended where Sasha's memory began, in a POW camp. The location was off, sure, but could he really explain it away as coincedence?

They were watching him, waiting for a reaction to Steve's story. He didn't know how to give one.

* * *

This whole situation was surreal. Here Steve was, recounting the story of Bucky's life with Bucky sitting right there on the couch, watching him impassively the whole time.

He'd feared that Bucky didn't remember him anymore the moment he opened his mouth on that couch and his Russian accent came out. He'd ignored the sympathetic look Natasha had sent him, confirming that she took it to mean the same thing he did. But apparently he didn't even remember that he _had_ remembered. What also was surprising was that Bucky seemed to remember the time he'd spent with that unsettling distance behind his eyes, if a bit hazily.

"When was this?" came Bucky's voice, pulling Steve out of his thoughts. It had been several long moments since Steve had finished speaking. "When did he die?"

"Eight years ago," Steve answered.

"Eight years," Bucky repeated. "And how old was he?"

"Twenty."

Bucky leaned back in his seat a little. "I'm twenty-nine."

That wasn't right. Steve was twenty-nine. Bucky was twenty-eight this past March. "According to what?"

Bucky snorted. "My birth certificate."

"Your Russian birth certificate?"

"What else?" Steve didn't bother saying he thought his birth certificate must be wrong. He also tried not to think about how Bucky must have had to learn his birthday from a government-issued piece of paper.

"If you don't mind my asking," Steve said carefully, "where were you eight years ago?"

Bucky met his gaze. "Chechnya."

Chechnya. Could that be true? Was that something Bucky actually remembered, or just something he'd been told?

"And before that?"

Bucky didn't look away, but he didn't answer, either. After a few moments, he said quietly, "If I were him, and I'm not saying I am, then you should be able to tell me something about myself that my best friend would know."

Steve tried not to show his surprise as he said the first thing that came to mind. "You told me that before your mom died, you used to ask her for a little sister."

A muscle in Bucky's jaw twitched impatiently. "I meant something that I would also know about myself."

Oh. Steve felt the flush rise to his face even as he his brain was reeling a bit from the fact that Bucky seemed to be admittng that there were things about himself he didn't know. He cast around for something that would be lasting. "You have a scar on your left elbow from falling halfway down a fire escape when we were kids."

At that Bucky actually laughed, although he didn't look happy by any means. Steve watched as he pulled off his left glove and shrugged out of his jacket.

His left arm was made entirely out of gleaming metal.

Sam whistled lowly. Bucky's gaze traveled to Steve's throat and Steve realized that his hand had strayed there unconsciously. He shoved it into his pocket. Not an armored glove, indeed. Well, that explained why the man had been wearing a jacket and gloves in the middle of summer.

"Got anything else?" Bucky asked.

"How…?" Steve breathed.

"I got pretty fucked up in Chechnya." The impatience was creeping back into his voice. "Got anything _else_?"

"That is a nice piece of hardware," said Sam appreciatively. Bucky tipped his head in acknowledgement.

Steve wasn't squeamish by any means, but the possibilities of what could have happened to Bucky in Chechnya or wherever he had been were making him feel a little sick to his stomach. He pushed it and the rising anger down and wracked his brain for something else. "You have another scar, a vertical line above your ankle on the back of your leg. Can't remember which one. Don't know how the hell it got there. You looked down one day while we were hanging out and you were bleeding like a stuck pig."

The rise and fall of Bucky's chest had deepened about halfway through what Steve was saying, though his expression was still carefully guarded, perhaps even more so than it had been.

"You're not about to roll up your pants and reveal that you've got two bionic legs, are you?" Sam cracked. The corner of Bucky's mouth worked, but Steve didn't think it was hiding a smile. Bucky shook his head minutely.

"Who sent you?" His voice was low and would have sounded dangerous if not for the slight tremor to his words.

"No one sent us," Steve assured him. "We live here. You're the one who came here."

Bucky blinked, then straightened, a light of dawning realization flickering on behind his eyes. "I'm the one who came here." Before Steve could ask, his brow furrowed. "But I wasn't sent here. I was sent to Lake George."

Steve straightened too, thinking he might be catching on to where Bucky was going. "What's in Lake George?"

"Who sent you to Lake George?" Natasha asked, speaking up for the first time in several minutes.

"My therapist," Bucky answered, jaw set as if he expected someone to say something about that. He was in the wrong crowd if he thought that would get any reaction.

"Doesn't Monty's family run a lake house up there?" Sam jumped in. "He mentioned something about hanging around there for a bit this summer."

"Falsworth?" Steve was getting a little excited. Sam nodded, his eyes a bit brighter too.

"Who's that?" Bucky asked, looking between them.

"One of your—one of Bucky's old war buddies. Some of the British, Australian, and Polish forces got captured and sent to the same camp as Bucky's unit and Falsworth was one of the Brits. He contacted me after—after they were rescued, and he and Sam have stayed in touch. Sam's a vet, too." Bucky's eyes widened.

"Where in Lake George were you going to stay?" Natasha asked. Bucky pulled up the address on his phone, and Steve saw that his hands were shaking slightly. He showed them the screen. Sam punched it into Google, and started to laugh.

"It's him?" Steve guessed.

"Falsworth Retreat, rooms to let." Sam shook his head. "I'm calling him."

"Don't do that, it's like 4:30," Bucky protested, and Steve wondered if he was genuinely concerned about the time or if he was afraid to dig even deeper into this. In either case, Sam just waved him off, dialing. He put it on speaker phone and set the phone on the coffee table. Several long moments later a groggy voice answered.

" _Sam Wilson, you better have a good reason for calling me at not even five-oh-bloody-clock._ "

"Is that what time it is?" Sam was grinning. "I'm guessing you're stateside, then?"

" _Yes, and you sound too damn cheerful for this to be an emergency._ "

"Oh, it is, don't worry. Have you been expecting a-what's your last name?" Bucky frowned but muttered,

"Volkov. Aleksander Volkov."

"Aleksander Volkov," Sam repeated.

" _Yeah, someone called in a reservation under that name a few days ago, but the guy hasn't shown up yet. Why?_ "

"Did you call that in, or was it your therapist?" Sam asked Bucky, keeping his voice low for the sake of the phone.

"It was him."

"The guy who called it in," Sam raised his voice again, "did he say anything else?"

" _No. Just made the reservation. Why, do you know the guy?_ "

"Not really. But you do."

Bucky was looking very uncomfortable with this conversation.

" _Do I?_ _I don't recall anyone by that name._ "

"Is there a point to this phone call?" Bucky very nearly growled.

"I was hoping your guy would have told him something," Sam admitted.

"Well he didn't, and I can't exactly call him in the middle of his work day."

" _Who is that, Sam? Is that Volkov?"_

"Yeah, it's him."

" _Thought you didn't know the man."_

"We just met. Listen, Monty, he'll be up there sometime soon, alright? Mind if we tag along? We're going to tag along regardless of what you say right now, I just thought I'd play like I have manners for a second."

" _I don't know if it's the hour, but you're not making a lot of sense right now, Wilson. You do whatever you like, and now, if there's no emergency, I'm going to hang up and kindly reacquaint my head with my pillow._ "

"Alright, buddy, sweet dreams." The line went dead. Steve glanced at Bucky, who looked so tightly wound he might break any second.

"Look, if this is all too much—"

"No, I'll go, I need to talk to him," he cut in. "If he knew me—" The words seemed to come out before Bucky realized, and he froze. No one said a word. Steve's heart was in his throat.

Bucky sagged, letting his head fall back against the cushion and scrubbing a hand over his face. "There's...a possibility. A slight one. That I'm—that I might be him."

Steve would take it.

"There's a lot you don't remember about your life, isn't there?" Sam asked.

Bucky nodded stiffly.

"We can talk about it later," Sam offered kindly. "Right now we should all get some rest, Lake George is quite a drive." Suddenly Steve remembered that Natasha and Bucky had just gotten off a red-eye from Moscow and it was nearing five in the morning. He could see the pale exhaustion lining Nat's face. It really wasn't fair that she was getting dragged into this when she'd told Steve straight off the plane that all she wanted was sleep. Bucky looked tired but also a bit wired; Steve couldn't blame him.

"If you want you all can crash here. Nat, you take the guest room, Steve will room with me and Sasha can take the couch. It's comfier than it looks. That cool with everyone?"

Steve nodded, grateful that Bucky would be able to have some semblance of privacy to sort through everything. "Thanks, Sam."

* * *

Natasha appeared in the doorway of Sam's room. Sam was in the bathroom, and Steve was lying on a pile of blankets on his bedroom floor wearing the t-shirt he'd came in and a pair of Sam's sweats. He propped himself up on his elbows as Natasha sat cross-legged at the foot of his blankets.

"It's a lot," she said. Steve nodded. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah," he said without thinking about it. When she only looked at him, he forced himself to think about it. He sighed. "Like you said, it's a lot."

"He might not remember, but he at least seems willing to try and figure this all out. That's good. And for a second he… well, you know." He did. Bucky had remembered, if only briefly, in that alley. They had both seen it. "That could get interesting," said Nat.

"You should get some sleep, Natasha."

"I wonder how Sasha's therapist knew about Falsworth," she said, ignoring him. "It's too strange to be coincedence."

"I don't know," Steve said honestly. "Bucky will probably call him tomorrow. Or I guess, later today."

Natasha raised her eyes to his. "You know, he probably still won't want you to call him that."

"I know." They sat there quietly for a moment, then Steve asked, "When's Clint getting back?"

"Don't know," she said, pursing her lips slightly. She and Clint shared an apartment in Steve's building and it had taken Steve the better part of a year to figure out whether they were together or not (they were). He thought about what she'd said to Bucky, about how she used to do everything Clint told her. She'd never mentioned that before. Clint worked for an organization that was kind of like a weirder, more secretive version of the CIA and had a run-in with Natasha years ago when she'd been with the KGB. Steve still didn't know all the details, but Clint brought her in and she ended up defecting to Clint's organization. She'd worked alongside him for a while (which, now that Steve thought about it, explained why she would have confused Clint for a new handler) before finally deciding she needed to get out of that lifestyle all together. Clint had stayed, although he seemed to retire every ten minutes to spend more time with her or play ultimate frisbee.

Steve had never claimed to have normal friends.

Clint was currently at a not-retired-anymore point of his life. "He says this mission could wrap up anytime between a few days and a few weeks," Natasha continued, letting it show clearly through her tone exactly what she thought of that.

The bathroom door opened and Sam stepped in. "Aren't you supposed to be in the guest room?" He accused. "How many hours has it been since you saw the inside of your eyelids? You're not supposed to be in here fraternizing."

"Yes, sir," she drawled, pulling herself to her feet. "Although I assure you my honor is intact."

"It's not _your_ honor I'm worried about."

Natasha smiled. "Goodnight, Sam. Up by noon?"

"Yeah, that'd be good."

"You know, you two don't have to come—"

"Shut up, Steve," Sam cut in. "We're coming. I'd take any excuse to visit Monty anyway. Nat knows all about super secret spy stuff, and besides, you make your boy a little uncomfortable, whereas I put him at ease." Steve knew he was being teased, but he couldn't help the little twinge that Sam had noticed that in the living room Bucky seemed particularly on edge talking to Steve. It hadn't seemed that way in the alley. In fact, Steve would have even ventured to say he'd almost helped him calm down, but then maybe that was just the fact that out of the options of him and Natasha, Steve was the less terrifying one.

Steve took a long breath. "Thank you. Both of you."

"Anytime," said Sam, as Natasha said, "Goodnight, Steve."

* * *

I write so much dialogue. Like, I've realized the stories I write are basically just people having conversations in different places. That's how I come up with ideas, by laying awake at night and imagining conversations. So I guess I'm your girl, if you're into that.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Steve's art channel. I'm not sure how important Clint will be to this story, but he's at least important to Natasha's story, so.

(Also, I promised **Firestar'sniece** that the title would make sense in this chapter, but looks like that's gonna have to wait for the next one.)


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: There was a mix-up of two different versions of chapter 3 being posted on this site and on Ao3. The one on Ao3 was the correct version; Sasha's surname was meant to be Volkov. It has been corrected on this site now. I apologize for any confusion.

* * *

It wasn't the first time Sasha had had to spend the night in a complete stranger's home, but it was the first since he'd been out of the field. He appreciated that he was in the living room and not a back bedroom far from the only exit, but it still put him far out of his comfort zone, which admittedly was about as narrow as the sofa he was meant to sleep on.

Sleep wasn't going to come, and Sasha didn't see much point in trying. Even if he thought one of Steve's videos would have been able to help him relax enough to sleep, which at this point he doubted anything could do, it would just feel too strange to pull up his channel now that he'd met the guy.

So instead he curled himself up on the sofa, his knees drawn up, and stared at his phone. The need to talk to his therapist was a sharp itch in his chest, to figure out what the hell he had been sent into. Lake George was too random of a destination for it to be a coincidence that the guy who ran the house knew Bucky Barnes.

He unlocked the phone and drew up his contacts, scrolling until he came to the right one. Dr. Erskine was most available during his lunch hour, which he took every day at half past noon like clockwork. Sasha planned to call at that time to be sure he would answer; he hated leaving voicemails.

It was 05:29 now, 12:29 in Moscow. He poised his finger over the call button.

05:30. He tapped. It rang once, twice, eight times before going to voice mail. He hung up and double-checked his time zone math, then waited two minutes and called again. Still no answer.

He did his best to ignore the slick feeling in his gut and left a voicemail.

"Hey, Dr. Erskine. I know I'm not scheduled to call for a few days still, but I had to know what the hell's up. How do you know—" _this Falsworth person_ , he'd planned to say, but the tight feeling in his stomach stopped him. Ears everywhere. It was one part of his paranoia Dr. Erskine had never really tried to therapize out of him, confirming to Sasha that there was actually something to it. "I'm…" he stumbled. "Please call back. Thanks."

He hung up, trying to imagine a hundred different scenarios in which his therapist would reasonably be unable to answer the phone in the small window of two minutes, but everything his brain produced involved kidnappings and/or quickly hushed-up death, and he had to get off the sofa.

Dr. Erskine is fine, he told himself as he paced the length of the room. He kept that mantra going in his head, _He's fine, he's fine, he's fine, he stepped out for a minute without his phone, he's fine, he's fine, his last session before lunch ran a little late, he's fine, his sessions never run late, he's_ fine.

It was going to be a long morning. He lifted the strands of hair that had escaped his loose bun to cling to the back of his neck, trying to cool himself off. If it had been up to him he would have left for Lake George right then, but he could hardly begrudge these people their need for rest. He entertained the idea of getting a rental car like he had originally planned and leaving the three of them here. He didn't really need them, and they would probably follow him anyway. At least that way he would be able to talk to Falsworth on his own before they caught up. Actually, now that he though about it, there wasn't really any reason for him to stay.

He tried Dr. Erskine's number one more time (voicemail again) before grabbing his backpack.

"Do you ever sleep, or is creepy dissociation your preferred method of recharging?"

Sasha calmed his racing heart and cursed himself for letting someone sneak up on him, although he supposed he could almost be forgiven considering Natalya was an ex-field agent herself, and a good one by the looks of things. Almost forgiven, but not quite. She walked past him into the open kitchen area as if she didn't even notice that he had his backpack on and was halfway to the door.

"What about you?"

"I sleep when I can," she said, pulling a pitcher of water out of the fridge. "It just so happens that now is not one of those times. Water?"

He watched her as she opened the cupboard. "No?" she guessed, pulling down a glass for herself and pouring. She watched him right back as she took a sip, and it was almost funny when he thought about it, the two who needed sleep more desperately than any of them, awake and watching each other. It made him think of what she'd said in the alley again, about how he reminded her of herself, and of course that brought to the forefront of his mind what had been bothering him about her ever since she'd said that.

"You defected," he said bluntly.

She considered him for a moment before her eyebrows drew up slightly in surprise. "And you didn't," she said as if it was a revelation. "How did I not notice that before?" she added, more to herself than to him. "That does explain how you live in Moscow."

"What were you doing in Moscow?" The question came out accusing, but he didn't really care.

"Relax, Volkov, I wasn't spying on Russia. I wasn't lying when I said I teach ballet now," she said. "Believe it or not, I still have a couple friends over there who don't mind me visiting. I'm good at being careful." Though apparently not careful enough to avoid admitting to a former FSB agent that she was a defector.

She turned and rummaged through Sam's pantry for a minute before emerging victoriously with a packaged blueberry muffin. "So, an ex-agent but not a defector," she said as she ripped into the package and took a bite out of the muffin as if this was ordinary early-morning breakfast conversation. "You'd serve again if you could," she guessed.

" _Vernost' partii_ ," he hissed. " _Vernost' rodine_."

She quirked an eyebrow. "That motto died with the KGB in '91."

He snorted. Was she playing stupid? "You know as well as I do that the KGB didn't die, just got a name change and a nice remodeling. Turns out some of the old-timers still liked the motto."

"And so do you," she noted. "I'll take that as a yes, that you'd go back. And who are you calling old?"

So she had been KGB. That was… certainly interesting. Perhaps that had something to do with why she defected. That had all been before Sasha's memory, but he'd heard the stories. Those kind were told by the ones who praised the FSB as being far less corrupt than its predecessor, although there were definitely many who thought the organization hadn't really changed all that fundamentally.

"Something happened," she said. "Some reason you can't go back to them. But you didn't betray them; besides the fact that your little motto-spouting's enough to prove you're incapable of that, you'd be in prison, at the least, if you had. So something else."

His hand tightened on the strap of his backpack. "Care to start taking guesses?"

The corner of her lip twitched upward almost apologetically. "That's alright. You were going somewhere." At his blank look, she tipped her head toward the door. "Weren't you? I won't keep you here."

"But you'll follow," he guessed. She shrugged one shoulder.

"Steve will follow. Sam won't let him go alone, and he'll drag me along too. Should be fun. I envy you missing out on the three-and-a-half-hour car ride with the two of them, though." He doubted she meant it. For all her reserved composure, he suspected she was tremendously fond of her friends.

"Steve," he said. He meant to ask her something about him, but he realized he had so many questions he didn't know where to go with that sentence after the first word.

"Steve," Natalya agreed. "How _did_ you know his name, by the way? I never said it. You didn't remember him, did you?"

Sasha grimaced. He'd been hoping that wouldn't come up again. He shook his head; might as well come clean. "I've seen his videos." No need to mention that he watched them regularly, or anything.

"His videos?"

"Yeah, you know, his art channel on Youtube."

Natalya's eyes lit up. It was, honestly, a beautiful sight to behold. "Steve has an art channel?"

"Yeah," he said somewhat awkwardly. He'd assumed she knew about it, and now he suddenly felt like he was betraying Steve's privacy.

"This is great," she said. Maybe she'd be too focused on teasing Steve about having an art channel that she'd forget to tease Sasha for watching it. But the small smile that tugged at her lips before she took another bite of muffin actually didn't seem teasing. She genuinely seemed to be delighted.

"He's really good," he said, for lack of anything else to say.

"He is," she agreed, then nodded toward the door again. "Now go on, get out of here."

He wondered if he should thank her or something, but no, he didn't owe her anything. He mentally shook his head at himself, reminding himself that allowing him to leave a place that wasn't even his own home was hardly something that required gratitude.

He had the door open when she spoke again. "Sasha."

"What?" he asked impatiently. He wasn't really feeling particularly impatient, but it felt comfortable to talk like he was.

She didn't say anything else for a moment, prompting him to actually turn to look at her. Her face was carefully blank. "Are you in danger?"

He thought of Dr. Erskine ( _he's fine he's fine he's_ fine).

"I don't know."

She nodded. He left.

* * *

If Steve hadn't woken up on Sam's floor, he probably would have thought that the morning had all been a dream. As it was he was still having a hard time comprehending that Bucky was _alive_ and _in this apartment_ and none of it really made sense, but his heart hadn't found a good reason to care.

Except when he went out into the living room, leaving Sam to rouse himself enough to crawl out of bed, Bucky was nowhere to be found. Natasha sat at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee and scrolling through something on her phone. No one was in the bathroom.

Something must have shown on his face, because when Natasha looked up she quickly said, "You're not crazy. He was here."

He let out a breath, before registering the past tense. "Was."

"He left, oh—" she glanced at her phone, "six hours ago." Steve stared. He left. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but… well, it was. "Got such a head start on us, he's probably had a couple hours to chat with Falsworth already."

He blinked. "He went to Falsworth's?"

"He did say he needed to talk to the guy, remember? Plus he already rented the space, it'd be such a waste."

"Oh," he said, feeling stupid. And stupidly relieved.

"Where's your boy at?" Sam stumbled into the room, still looking about 70% asleep.

"Lake George," said Nat.

"He has a name," said Steve.

"He has two," said Sam, "and I'm not sure which one is socially acceptable to use in this crowd."

That was a fair enough point. "We ready to ship out?"

Sam nodded. "Soon as you get your car. I ain't walking two hundred miles."

Right. His car that was still at the airport. He checked his watch. If it took him around fifteen minutes to walk to the airport and a couple to drive back, they should get to Falsworth's around three. He sighed internally. It was a good thing tomorrow was Sunday.

* * *

Falsworth Retreat was, Sasha had to admit, a pretty nice place, or at least it seemed to be from the outside. It looked plenty big enough to house a large family, complete with an outdoor picnic area. There was a park with a beach and playground just a short walk down from the front yard. The perfect vacation spot for someone who wasn't in the middle of a wacked-out identity crisis.

He sat in the driveway for several minutes, feeling...well, just about as nervous as could be expected given the situation. For once he didn't feel like he was overreacting. The idea that his entire life, everything he'd ever believed about his past and who he was, could be (probably _was_ ) a lie, it was terrifying, to say the least.

He hadn't got up the nerve to get out of his car yet when the front door to the house opened and a man with a dirty blond mustache and neatly combed hair came out onto the porch. He raised his hand in a wave. Shit, now he'd been caught just sitting in his car, how long had the guy known he was here? Sasha scrambled out, scraping his elbow against the car door in his hurry. The left one, just his luck; he checked frantically to make sure there wasn't a scratch on the rental's paint. Blessedly, there wasn't. Jacket sleeves to the rescue.

He turned back to the man on the porch, who was standing in the same spot, looking thunderstruck. If Sasha were to take a wild guess, he'd say the guy probably recognized him. It was just another confirmation of everything he'd been told since he got here, and he felt his stomach coil impossibly tighter.

"Well, I'll be fu—"

"Are you Falsworth?" Sasha asked quickly.

The guy blinked dazedly. "I'm not sure I could tell you that with any sort of confidence just now." Sasha shuffled his feet uncomfortably, not sure how to respond to this situation. Maybe he should have waited and come with the others, let them explain things. He sure as hell didn't know how to.

"My mum always did warn us about ghosts and such, I always thought it was a load of bollocks..." Falsworth went on.

"I'm not a ghost."

"No? Are you telling me you're not Sergeant James Barnes, or that he never died?"

Sasha took a deep breath. "I'm starting to think it's more likely the latter."

That seemed to take Falworth aback more than outright declaring that he was the fallen Barnes, back from the dead. "You mean you're not sure? Do you know who _I_ am?"

"Only what I've been told. You were with the British forces in Baghdad, and got captured along with Barnes' unit." It still felt too strange to say 'my unit,' even though Sasha was starting to believe it to be the case.

Falsworth took a step forward, considering, and now that Sasha got a good look at him, there _was_ something a bit familiar about his face. It was slight, though, and he didn't feel like he knew the man, just that he had maybe seen him before. He frowned.

"Come inside," said Falsworth. Sasha followed him into the house.

Falsworth was a bit pale, but other than that he seemed reasonably composed as he rounded the desk in the front entryway, grabbing a pen and consulting a binder laid open on the desk. "So, am I right in assuming you're the reservation? Aleksander Volkov?"

"Yes," said Sasha.

"Right." He made a note and then his eyes flicked up to meet Sasha's again. "You were with Sam Wilson last night. Thought he was tagging along?"

"Right, I kinda ditched them," he answered with a shrug. "They'll be here within a couple hours, probably."

"They?"

"Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers, and Natalya… Natasha, I mean." He didn't know her last name.

Falsworth blinked at him. "Steve Rogers? Your Steve? You've seen him already?"

Sasha shifted. His Steve, goodness gracious. "Yeah. He recognized me same as you."

He made an airy sound through his nose. "I bet he did. Surprised he let you get away without reattaching himself to your hip."

"Have you met Steve?"

Falsworth nodded. "Once, when we first got back and I was in the states, I looked him up and we went out for drinks. It was a… grim time." His eyes scanned up and down Sasha's face, shaking his head. "Holy mother of God, but you're really alive. Alive and… Russian."

Sasha chuckled. "Alive and Russian," he agreed.

"What the hell happened, Sarge?"

The nickname was foreign and unfamiliar, but with Falsworth's accent he could almost pretend it was a shortening of his name, and he found he didn't mind it too much. "I was hoping you'd be able to help me figure that out, actually."

* * *

"You had a smart mouth since I met you, too smart for your own good. Didn't seem to realise prison was a good time to learn to shut the hell up. You wound up one officer in particular, Colonel Jassim," he spit into the waste bin as he said the name, "and he'd beat the everliving piss out of you every chance he got. And he got a lot of chances. He was a real mean one, loved violence for the sport of it, and we all knew you were baiting him to draw the beatings away from the rest of us." He gave Sasha an exasperated look. "If I still thought you were dead, I'd have to pretend I'm not as angry about that as I am, but since you're here, I can tell you that you're a bloody idiot."

Sasha wasn't sure how to react to this information. He tried to picture this Bucky Barnes, full of impudence and selflessly taking beatings for his fellow prisoners, and reconcile the image with his current self. It's not that he thought he wouldn't do something like that for his friends if given the chance, but, well, it's hard to know what you would do when you haven't been in the situation. Or don't remember being in the situation, as the case may be. Besides the fact that the very few people he would have been bold enough to call his friends probably wouldn't call him that anymore. But that was one of the things he wasn't thinking about.

Falsworth seemed to take his silence as encouragement to go on. "But I guess we were all idiots, because me and Dugan and the others tried to get the colonel off your back." He had mentioned earlier that Dugan was one of the group of prisoners that both Falsworth and Barnes had befriended, an American like Barnes himself. "It didn't work," he went on. "He'd decided to actively dislike you from the beginning. Eventually you got too weak to work, and they took you to an isolation ward." His mouth flattened into a grim line. Sasha thought he could see where this was going, where it lined up with his own story. "Nobody knew what went on in isolation; all we knew was nobody who was ever sent there ever came back. It wasn't til the rescue that we were able to get in there and we found bodies. Just two of them, in two different rooms, the most recent prisoners who had been too weak to work. And there was… evidence." Falsworth, who had told the story so far with a kind of bleak calm, shuddered. "Of medical experimentation."

And there it was. The undeniable link connecting James Barnes to Aleksander Volkov. Sasha shut his eyes for a moment, not surprised to hear it, necessarily, but things somehow seemed different now that it had been said. Like there was no going back, no pretending he had never found out, that he had only ever been Aleksander Volkov and no one else.

"Does Steve know?"

A beat, and then Falsworth shook his head. "It's a war crime, Sarge, and that of the nastiest kind. All the officers involved were blown to shit before they could be prosecuted, and the story got buried, I suppose. He was already hurting so much, I… I couldn't."

Sasha was quiet, neither condoning his decision nor condemning it. He might have done the same in his shoes, whether it was right and fair or not.

"You don't seem surprised," Falsworth said hesitantly, as if he was afraid to ask, "Do you… remember it?"

Not all of it, by any means, only the things they'd done to him after whatever brain experiment gone wrong that had made him forget who he was. Even that was too much. He remembered the lacerations sliced into his arm, the burn of whatever new chemical they'd applied to the wounds, to see if it would aid in the clotting process, or something. It never did. The wounds just set into infection after infection.

"Enough of it," he answered. He could almost hear Falsworth's swallow, his adam's apple bobbing up and then down again.

"Well, you've heard my end of the story. Where do you pick up?"

Right. This was an exchange of information; Sasha couldn't just end the conversation now that he'd heard what he needed to know. This man had been his friend, had probably felt guilty that he hadn't been able to save his comrade from beatings and then from experimentation and death, and they were figuring this out together.

"That isolation ward," he started. "I thought—he told me it was in Chechnya. I didn't know Chechnya from my left boot, or Iraq for that matter; if he'd told me it was in Turkey I'd've believed him the same."

"Who is 'he'?"

Right. Start at the beginning. With mission reports that sort of thing wasn't really important; the only part of the story that mattered was the end: whether the target was eliminated or not.

"My savior," said Sasha. "Vasily Karpov. I don't know what he was doing in Iraq, but since he told me it was Chechnya that was never a question. I had been a soldier fighting the Chechen rebels, to restore the land to Russia. They had taken me prisoner, done experiments on me, and Vasya came to take me home."

"Did he tell you all this in English?" Falsworth asked, confused. "How did he manage to convince you that you were Russian while teaching you Russian?"

Ah, he was getting ahead of himself again. "No, ah, I guess it was actually a while until he told me anything, not until we were back in Russia." He winced slightly, wondering how to phrase this. "Whatever they'd done that made me lose my memories, it kind of fucked up a lot of other things in my head too. I couldn't really talk, and I wasn't understanding much of any language for a little while. When we worked on my Russian, it was normal because I was also having to relearn my English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean. Or at least," he stumbled slightly, still realizing all the implications, "I was told I was relearning them, that they'd been lost too." Now that he thought about it, his English had returned more quickly than the others. And, oddly enough, his French. Had he known French before?

Falsworth was staring at him, wide-eyed. "Why on God's green earth would you need to know all those languages?" Sasha frowned.

"That's standard, hell, that's minimum for an FSB agent."

"FS—what?" The man spluttered, looking bewildered. "Is that what they wanted you for, then?"

Sasha blinked, and then realized. That hadn't come up yet. He'd been so jumpy about having Natalya and Steve find out about his past, and here he was just tossing it in this guy's face. "Did I forget to mention that? I've been working for the FSB for the past eight years, just stopped not long ago." Up until that morning (was it really the same _day_ that the curtain blanketing his entire life had been ripped down?) he had thought that's what he'd been raised most of his life to do, his training only disrupted by the Second Chechen War and the need for more soldiers.

Falsworth made a disbelieving sound in his throat that turned into half a laugh. "Man, you are _shit_ at telling a story straight."

That surprised a smile out of Sasha. "Do you have any more questions?"

"Loads," said Falsworth. "First of all, if you've been a Russian agent this whole time with no memory of your past, why are you even here?"

"My—" Sasha stopped, quickly calculating Moscow time in his head. Dr. Erskine would still be working, on a regular day, but the fact that he hadn't answered his phone earlier like he usually would led Sasha to believe that perhaps this was not a regular day. "My therapist sent me here," he finished his sentence distractedly. "Actually, would you mind if I made a quick call?"

Falsworth raised his eyebrows and shook his head. "Not at all." Sasha pulled his phone out and went back into the entryway. It rang eight times before—damn it all—voicemail again. He cursed under his breath and locked the screen. Not a minute later, it lit up with a message notification.

Sasha stared dumbly at the screen for a moment before swiping up viciously. The number the message came from was listed as unknown. He read quickly, eagerly at first, then with a sinking stomach.

 _Do not attempt to contact Dr. Erskine again. An agent will be dispatched shortly to bring you home. Do not leave your current address or make contact with anyone outside of it as you await the agent's arrival. Your cooperation will be appreciated._

* * *

A/N: _Vernost' partii, vernost' rodine:_ Loyalty to the party, loyalty to the motherland.


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: All of this takes place in 2011, in case anyone wants to know, eight years after the invasion of Iraq and the insurgency of the second Chechen war in 2003.

Sasha realized he had been standing in the entryway for several minutes now, doing nothing but staring at his phone. The screen had gone black at some point. He remembered that Falsworth was still in the other room, waiting for him to get off the phone.

The sharp pound of his heart and the fog in his head was making it difficult to gather any kind of plan of action. He knew he needed to stay here, that much was hardly a question. His legs walked him back into the living room and he stood before the sofa where Falsworth still sat.

"Everything alright?" the man asked. Sasha nodded stiffly, gaze and mind elsewhere. Falsworth seemed to take the unconvincing answer as a signal to change the subject, moving into a conversation about things that Sasha figured Falsworth thought might give Sasha a better sense of his previous self. Sasha appreciated the thought even though it mostly just made him feel even more starkly disconnected from who that person had been.

"I've always thought you and I had a lot in common," Falsworth was saying. "We'd both rely on snark to get us through the nastiness, both of our parents named us good, respectable James, but we ended up stuck with poor bastardizations of our middle names. Truly brothers-in-arms."

Sasha was thinking it'd been quite a while since he'd felt particularly snarky, but what made it from his addled brain to his mouth was, "But you're British."

"I am," Falsworth said it like Sasha had made an important discovery. "And you are, or once were, an American, and while our countries haven't always gotten along, they usually do when it counts."

"An American," he repeated dully. It was still so strange a thought.

"Well, for one, you talk like one." When Sasha only gave him an incredulous look, he went on. "I don't mean that lovely Russian accent you've got going on, I mean the way you form sentences. Even if I didn't know you before, I'd be able to tell you've obviously learned English from Americans, and I bet if you thought about it you could easily speak with their accent."

Sasha considered that. He knew he could do a perfect American accent, although he had to put it on deliberately and it was just easier not to most of the time when he spoke English, but he had to be good at a lot of different accents in the field and hadn't thought anything of it. Was his American accent particularly New Yorker?

"I'm being extracted." The words left Sasha before he had even consciously decided to say them, before he'd fully decided whether he was going to tell Falsworth at all. The Brit blinked.

"What? Extrac—what do you mean? As in, removed from here? Right now?"

"Well, no, obviously not right now, there's no one here. But, soon. Not sure when. The flight from Moscow, if they're leaving from Moscow, the flight's around ten hours at the shortest, and then there's still the drive. But I don't know that whoever they're sending has left yet. They said shortly, but that could mean any—"

"Alright, alright," Falsworth broke in, and Sasha stopped, realizing he'd been talking faster and faster. He took a breath. "Why are you being extracted?"

"I was never supposed to come here."

The other man scrubbed a hand down his face. "Am I about to get a bunch of FSB agents crawling all over this house?"

Sasha didn't answer, instead turning his attention to the hallway that led to the stairs. "Where am I sleeping?"

Falsworth looked exasperated but answered, "I'll show you. Come on, let me grab the keys." Sasha waited and then followed him up the stairs. He gestured to the hallway at large.

"You can pick any room, they're all open. We usually have families staying, not individuals."

Sasha went into the room closest to them and dumped his backpack on the floor. Falsworth hovered.

"Listen, are you sure you want to stay here? Maybe we should get you somewhere safe—"

"Shh!" Sasha hissed frantically. Ears everywhere. "Please don't kick me out. I know, this isn't fair, none of this is fair to you. But I promise, I'll be as little trouble as possible."

Falsworth looked a little startled at being shushed, but he answered, "That's not really what I'm worried about."

"Thanks for the room," Sasha said, done with this conversation, done talking to anyone for the next few hours at least. Falsworth looked like he wanted to say something else but he took another look at Sasha's face and sighed, sliding a key off the ring.

"Let me know if you need anything," he said, handing over the key. Sasha nodded curtly and shut the door as soon as Falsworth was out of it. He turned the lock and walked the length of the room to the window, focusing on breathing, because he couldn't do anything else, he couldn't fucking do anything else.

"So, when were you planning on sharing with us that you're the next Bob Ross?"

"Excuse me?"

"This whole YouTube sensation thing you've got going on," Natasha explained with a smirk over to the driver's seat.

Steve groaned. "Sam," he accused, drawing the word out childishly. Sam raised his hands defensively from the back seat.

"Wasn't me. Didn't breathe a word."

"Sam knew about it?" Natasha punched Steve in the arm.

"Don't hit the driver! Sam was the one who made me start it in the first place."

"I didn't make you, I suggested that it might be a good thing. Is it not a good thing?"

"It's a good thing," he admitted. It was, really. Sam had suggested that it might be a good outlet for him when he'd found one of Steve's old sketchbooks and Steve admitted that he hadn't found time or motivation to draw in years. It was a good outlet, and keeping to a regular posting schedule forced him to find time to do what he really did enjoy. Sam didn't outright say he thought it would help with the listlessness Steve felt after losing the only two people he had really cared about in the short span of a year, but it did, a bit. Even if a side effect of having more energy meant he broke a few more punching bags at the gym where he worked as a physical trainer. "I would hardly use the term 'YouTube sensation,' though. I don't think hardly anyone watches them. So if Sam didn't spill, how'd you find out? You Google me?"

"No, I found out from—from Bucky." He didn't miss how she used the name Steve knew him by, even as his brow furrowed in confusion.

"Bucky? How'd he know?"

"Through his super secret spy network," she drawled, and he could almost hear her eyes rolling. "He watches them, idiot."

Steve opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed it again. Bucky watched his art videos.

"D'you s'pose that means something?" Sam asked after a moment. "Like, he subconsciously recognizes the voice of his best friend, or your art style, something like that?"

Natasha hmmed thoughtfully and honestly Steve didn't know what to make of it. He was getting tired of trying not to hope.

"When did he tell you this?" he asked instead. "You two have a little chat before he took off this morning?"

"Yeah," she said, surprising him. He frowned, taking his eyes off the road for a second to glance at her.

"Did you get any sleep at all?"

"A little," she said defensively. He could hardly blame her, though; it had taken him hours to fall asleep himself, and then it hadn't been very restful.

They were getting close now, blessedly. "Alright, navigator, which way?"

"Right turn in half a mile. Amherst St." He took the turn.

The Falsworths' place looked like it would be really expensive to rent. He wondered idly just who was footing the bill on Bucky's little 'vacation.'

"Finally!" Sam crowed, practically tumbling out of the backseat before Steve had even put the car into park. He murmured something joyfully that may have been 'land, sweet land.' Steve and Natasha followed, in a marginally more civilized manner. Sam knocked and then tried the door, which was locked. A few moments later Falsworth opened it.

"Took you all long enough."

"Monty, my man." Sam pulled him into a hug.

"Good to see you, Sam. Steve, and you must be Natasha." After exchanging smiles and nods of greeting, they all followed him inside, through an entryway into a well lit and homey-looking living area. It was empty of inhabitants. Bucky had come here, hadn't he?

"Is he here?" Steve asked.

"Yeah, shut himself in his room hours ago. Haven't heard a peep from him since."

Steve frowned. "Did he talk to you before that?"

Falsworth nodded. "Yeah, yeah, after nearly giving me a heart attack just by being alive. He wanted to know about the POW camp, and then he told his side and about Karpov. But then he had to make a call—"

"Karpov?"

"You know, the guy who got him out of the camp. Barnes said he didn't know why Karpov would have been in Iraq, but if I had to take a guess I'd say he was probably a supplier of some kind. Weapons, maybe. Russia wasn't exactly secretive about their support of Iraq in defending Baghdad. I wouldn't be surprised if he twisted it so the camp officers saw Barnes as fitting payment for the Russian's aid, or something like that." Falsworth sounded disgusted with the whole thing. Steve noted that he seemed to assume that Bucky had told them about Karpov already. Bucky hadn't told them much of anything; most of what they'd gathered had been Natasha being eerily good at interpreting every little move he made. Steve told himself that he was not jealous that Bucky had mentioned how he got out of the camp to Falsworth and not to him. He was not that childish. He just would have liked to hear it from Bucky, that was all.

"You said he had to make a call?" Natasha broke the beat of silence.

"Oh, right," Falsworth refocused. "He went to make a call, I don't know who he was talking to, but when he came back he said he was going to be extracted."

It took a moment for Steve to figure out what he meant by that, but when Natasha tensed next to him and asked stiffly, "And you just assume he's still here because…?" he thought he had a pretty good idea.

Falsworth wilted slightly under her gaze but defended himself, "He seemed to be under the impression that whoever was coming hadn't left yet, so we still have several hours, at the least…"

"Would you mind terribly if I check?" she asked.

"If he's still here?" he asked. She nodded. "Be my guest, but I'm sure—"

Natasha was already past him, at the bottom of the stairs. Steve smiled apologetically at Falsworth and followed.

All of the doors on the second floor were closed. "Sasha?" Nat called out to the hallway at large, unsure of which was his room.

The somewhat reluctant answer came a few moments later from behind the first door. "What?"

"Just checking to make sure you hadn't been whisked away. Heard you're due to be extracted. You wanna open the door and come talk about what that means?"

"You know what it means. Nothing to talk about."

"There is, actually," she said dryly. "Like about how there's no way that's happening."

A silence, and then, "I'm not going to open the door, Natalya. I'll talk to you in the morning."

"What, when you're halfway to Russia?"

"No. I just need—" he cut himself off and Steve caught Nat's eye. He thought he had a pretty good idea of what Bucky needed. If Falsworth had told him about the POW camp and Bucky had responded by opening up about his side of the story, there was a very good chance that he was starting to truly realize the truth of who he was. He probably needed to be alone, to try and process.

Unfortunately they didn't have the time to afford him that luxury, as much as Steve wanted to give it to him. Bucky had had a few hours to himself before they got there, at least. "When did you make that call with whoever you were talking to?" he asked.

It took a moment for Bucky to answer. Maybe he hadn't realized Steve was there. "I didn't make any call. It was an untraceable text."

"The text, then."

"Around, four hours ago?"

"If you're just going to keep answering our questions, you might as well open the door," said Natasha. Steve wasn't sure that was the best approach, since he might just stop answering their questions, but after about thirty seconds of uncertain silence, the door opened. And Steve stared.

Standing before him was Bucky Barnes. His hair was cut short, almost as short as Steve remembered it, curling slightly on the longest parts on top, his slight scruff shaved clean, and Steve was suddenly seventeen, opening the door of the room he now shared with his best friend, because the Barnes were dead and Bucky was barely holding it together and this was one thing Steve could offer him.

Christ.

"Did you just cut your own hair in there?"

Bucky's expression stayed blank for a second before he blinked in realization, running his fingers through the short hairs on the back of his neck. "Oh. No, I got it cut on the way up here. New York is hot."

Steve tried to picture high school Bucky changing his hair just because it was too hot. If they were going out somewhere, like dancing downtown, he might preen in front of the mirror for an hour, combing his hair just right. Steve was always telling him he cared too much 'bout how he looked, but it did work for him. The fact that hair had become a purely practical thing to Bucky now made Steve a little sad.

Not that this cut didn't look good. It really did. Maybe there was a bit of vanity in him yet.

"You look good," said Nat. "You wanna come downstairs or stay up here?"

"Up here." Bucky gave a sigh, apparently resigning himself to the fact that they weren't going to leave him alone, and was Steve imagining it or were his cheeks a little pinker than they had been a second ago? "Sam and Falsworth are old friends, right? They'll be alright on their own." They followed him back into the nicely furnished bedroom.

"What exactly did the text say?" Natasha asked. He picked his phone up from the foot of the bed and showed them. Steve frowned as Natasha translated it out loud. He didn't like the tone of these people at all.

"Is Dr. Erskine your therapist?"

Bucky nodded. "Every time I tried to call him, there was no answer. Went to voicemail."

"Do you think he could be in danger?" Natasha asked.

Bucky sagged a bit, relief clear in his eyes, which didn't make much sense to Steve until he spoke, "Yes. That's exactly what I'm thinking. That's not paranoid?"

So the relief must have been because someone else had brought it up. "Unfortunately, no," said Nat. "It's not. Based on this message, I can assume he wasn't acting under any orders. Let's hope he knew what he was doing, sending you here."

"Can they even do this, this whole extraction thing?" Steve asked. "Organizations extract their own agents. I thought you got out."

"Wasn't a clean break. And they can do whatever the hell they want."

"Actually, legally, they can't," said Natasha. "You're on American soil, you have American citizenship."

"No, I don't. Bucky Barnes does, and he's dead, legally."

"Well then, we'll just have to let them know you're ali—" Steve was cut off by Bucky's hand over his mouth, the brunet's eyes wide.

"Stop saying shit like that," he hissed. "Both of you."

Steve stared, unmoving until the other man removed his hand. "Have you checked the house for bugs?" Natasha asked, unruffled.

"Of course." Bucky sounded offended.

"Find any?"

"No…"

"Then we're fine."

He was shaking his head before she finished her sentence. "We can't know that, just because I didn't find any doesn't mean they're not here, just that they're well hidden."

"Are you saying you're not competent enough to find a few bugs in a civilian home?" Nat taunted, but it didn't have the desired effect.

"I'm not competent enough to do much of anything, but that's not the point."

The blatant self-deprecation was a bit worrying, but Steve didn't mention it. "Why would you think Falsworth's place is bugged?" They both turned to look at him.

"I assume every place is bugged," Bucky said, like it was obvious, and after a moment Nat shrugged and nodded.

"It's probably not," she admitted, "but old habits die hard. To be honest, I was planning to check the place too before we spent the night here."

"Have you checked my place?" Steve asked, the thought occurring to him suddenly.

"Please," she rolled her eyes. "I've checked our entire building. And Sam's," she added before he could ask. "Need I remind you I live with Clint Barton? We find new bugs in our apartment every month or so. But don't worry, yours is always clean."

"You have bugs in your apartment?" Bucky was visibly nervous again. "So they really don't ever leave you alone, even a defector."

"They're bugging Clint, not me," she assured him. "It's not Russia, it's Clint's organization. I've made a clean break." The knowledge that some shadowy spy organization may or may not be listening to everything going on in Natasha and Clint's apartment at any given moment wasn't exactly reassuring to Steve, but now wasn't really the time to discuss said organization's lack of trust in its agents.

"So what's our plan here?" he asked instead. "I assume we're not just giving him up without a fight."

"Of course not," said Nat, as Bucky said, "Of course you are." The three of them looked at each other for a moment.

"You can't be serious." Steve shook his head in disbelief, growing a bit anxious that they were going to have to try and help someone who wasn't on board with being helped. "You really just want to go back to them? After what you know now?"

"You think they're going to give me a choice?"

"There's always a choice. Scratch that," Nat amended, "there's not always a choice, but in this case I don't think they're going to physically force you on American soil, especially with a couple of American and British citizens as witnesses. We could make a scene, get them wrapped up in a lot of questioning I'm sure they want to avoid. What they did to you is not only illegal, it could shake the tentatively friendly relations our two countries are holding together right now."

Bucky looked skeptical. "It's not that big a deal. I'm just one person."

Welcome to the USA, where the government casually exploits its own citizens but God forbid anyone else lay a hand on one of them. There was a bigger issue here though, so Steve asked, "Are you sure? Can you be sure, that you're the only one?"

Flickers of doubt ran across Bucky's face. "I guess not."

"I know you probably don't want to talk about it," Nat started carefully, "but why aren't you an agent anymore? It could be important for us to know if they have leverage they think they can use against you."

Bucky's expression closed off. "I fucked up. On a mission. Bad."

"That's it?" She didn't sound impressed. "They poured way too many resources into you to throw you away after one botched mission."

"It wasn't just—someone died." The last word was spoken viciously, as if he resented her for making him say it.

"That's unfortunate, but again not entirely unus—"

"It was someone you care about," Steve guessed, because it was written all over Bucky's face and to get Natasha to stop talking. Bucky's eyes flicked to his face and Steve could see him forcing his closed-off mask back into place, schooling his expression into something detached and indifferent even as he said,

"I don't even know why it happened, just that it was my fault. And then coming back, I...I had a nervous breakdown. One I haven't quite recovered from. My nerves are completely shot, I can barely even hold a rifle, let alone shoot straight. So they set me up with a shrink and set me aside." He ripped his eyes away from Steve's to glare at Natasha, and anyone else would have pissed their pants under that gaze. Steve hated to think where his face had learned to look so deadly."That enough leverage for you?"

Nat, of course, was unaffected, shaking her head. "No, I don't see how they could use that, at least nothing immediately comes to mind. They're probably going to use your therapist against you, if they can."

"So what are you proposing I do? Just let them threaten him, do whatever they like?"

"You're forgetting we have leverage too," she reminded him. "They told you not to contact anyone; they're obviously afraid you'll expose what they've done and cause a big scandal. They're relying on your cooperation."

"So we both have leverage," said Bucky. "Now we're at a standstill. It's a risky game we're playing here."

"We're not the ones who made the game," Steve muttered.

It took them a while to decide whether they should leave Sasha alone in his room for the night to respect his privacy or have someone stay with him to make sure he didn't disappear, but eventually they settled on letting Natalya 'sleep' outside his door, at her insistence. Sasha tried his best not to be weirded out by that.

Of all the things that could, probably should, have been on his mind right now, what Sasha found himself trying to puzzle out as soon as his back hit the mattress was Steve. From what the man had told him of Bucky Barnes, it seemed that the two of them had been quite close. Besides the fact that Falsworth had called him 'your Steve'… Had Bucky talked about Steve over in Iraq? His presence put Sasha a little on edge, since he was clearly supposed to know this person, and he just...didn't. And yet, his voice...it was the same as with those damn videos, there was something about his voice that was calming even when Steve himself sounded worried.

Sasha wanted to know more about him, and he really didn't at the same time. Knowing more might just make him feel worse. Although that might be a bit of a difficult feat, considering the current crushing weight of all the lies he'd apparently been told his whole life. He couldn't think about it too long without his chest constricting with barely-suppressed panic, and yet he couldn't think about anything else, couldn't find anything that mattered that wasn't tied to those lies.

He was waiting for the extractor. That was all he could do.

Was that all he could do? Why was he going back? He felt heady with the forbidden nature of even the thought, because of course he had to go back. But at the same time, how could he go back to the people who had lied to him, to the life where he had failed to do the one thing he was meant to do? If he went back he might never find out more about who he was before. He felt certain that he wouldn't be allowed to keep in touch.

But if he went back, he would surely eventually recover, might eventually be able to serve again. It hadn't been so long, he still needed to give himself time.

To serve the people who had lied to him about who he was. Was there any possibility, any at all, that all of this was just a ridiculously eerie coincidence, that Bucky Barnes wasn't who he'd been before?

No. He couldn't even try to half-way convince himself of that. Steve had recognized him, Falsworth had recognized him, and even if all of that had been some weird trick, Steve knew about a scar he had on his leg and Falsworth said Bucky Barnes had been experimented on as a prisoner of war. There was no coincidence.

But even though there was no way around the fact that they'd lied to him… They were all Sasha knew. Vasya was his friend; besides the fact that he'd dragged Sasha out of hell and given him his life, he'd always shown him kindness and they got on well. Sasha would definitely have said that he trusted him. Perhaps Vasya had been tricked as well. Surely he had.

Sasha at least needed to give him a chance. He needed answers. Half of him wanted to pull out his phone and ask him about it, but he wouldn't dare. He'd been ordered not to have contact with anyone, and while he wasn't technically employed by the people who gave the order anymore, he wasn't naive enough to think he was completely independent of them now. He kept the phone in his pocket.

After a moment he heard quiet talking outside of his door. Natalya's voice, and Steve's. He was struck with the idea of this room as his cell, his jailers outside discussing his fate. He tried to shake it off. Despite the weirdness of the situation, they didn't seem like bad people. Although Sasha was starting to wonder how good of a judge he was. He locked the door.

A moment later there was a tap on his window. It was light, easily mistaken for a swaying, thin branch. Or it would have been, if not for the distinctive rhythm, one Sasha would know anywhere. He didn't have to look to realize that crouched on his windowsill was the absolute last person he wanted to see.

He closed his eyes with a quiet curse.

When he thought about it, she was the perfect choice. He liked her, and she couldn't stand him. He would listen to her, felt obligated to her, and she wouldn't be tempted to take pity on him.

He slid the window open. Her feet didn't make a sound hitting the carpet. "Sasha. I see you're well."

Slipping back into Russian should have felt like coming home, and in a way it did, but talking to her, it seemed more like a home where he was no longer welcome. "Not the place I thought we'd be seeing each other again, Wanda."


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Hi, it's me, here with an update over a year later as if that's in any way acceptable! At least this chapter is the longest yet, right?

"We've gotta do something. He's just gonna go back with them."

"What can we do, though? We can't exactly force him to stay if he doesn't want to."

"I know." Steve was playing with a loose thread on Monty's rug while he, Sam and Monty played hangman on one of the guest rooms' complementary pads of paper that they'd swiped from the next room over. None of them had any desire for sleep, Sam and Steve because they'd woken up at noon, Monty because someone was probably about to break into his family's house, and all of them because they were far too wired to get any real rest. Nat had refused Steve's offer of company waiting outside Bucky's door, so they'd settled onto the floor of Monty's bedroom with a promise from Nat that she'd text them if she needed them. He wasn't holding his breath. "I just wish there was some way to make him want to stay. It's kinda difficult since he doesn't know me."

"He did for a second there, though," Sam said, drawing a stick arm on their man. "Sorry, Monty, no Ls. Any idea what set him off that time?"

"He had his hand wrapped around my throat. I… got too close?"

"Or the idea of hurting his bestie was so terrible that his brain threw a hissy fit."

Steve chuckled. It was a nice thought, anyway. "Thank you for that psychiatrist's perspective."

"Hold on, he remembered you?" Monty looked between the two of them. "Care to fill me in?"

Steve told him about what happened in the alley, including the weirdness of getting him to Sam's apartment. Monty whistled low. "Freaky stuff. I wonder if it could be triggered again."

"It might've just been random."

"Too bad he won't come join the party, or we could just have him sit in your lap and see if anything happens." Steve chucked his empty can of Sprite at Sam. The vet laughed. "Quit abusin' me and give me a letter."

"N."

"Monty already guessed N. There's three Ns right there, just staring you in the face. Get your head in the game, Rogers."

"Sorry." He actually looked at the letters this time. "H. This is a movie title?"

"Yep. Two Hs."

"I talked to him about the war some," Monty said. "Didn't seem to spark anything."

"I basically laid out the entire story of his life and it didn't spark anything," Steve added. "I don't know if that's really the tack we should go for, though. He didn't remember for long and it just seemed to hurt him more than anything."

"Yeah, maybe not. P?"

"No P's." A stick leg was added. "Your guy's on thin ice. When do I stop? Do I give him hair, a face?"

"Might as well."

"What _happened,_ Monty?" Steve had tugged a bit too hard on the thread and it unraveled the rug a little bit. He felt like a kettlebell was sitting at the base of his stomach. "How did this happen?"

If the acutely uncomfortable look that overtook the Brit's face was anything to go by, he didn't need Steve to clarify. "Karpov took him from the camp. That thing I mentioned about being a supplier was just me speculating, but I'd bet I'm right."

"But why Bucky? And what'd he _do_ to him?"

Steve had been expecting that for the most part, all Monty would be able to give him were more speculations, but the other man was quiet for so long that Steve suddenly wondered if he might actually know.

"Monty."

"That time we went for drinks… I might have withheld some things from you." Monty looked him in the eye, and his face was grave. The kettlebell in Steve's stomach pressed down a little harder.

"What kind of things?"

"When I told you that the officers worked him to death, I thought I was telling the truth. I definitely didn't know he survived. I just… left out some steps in between. When he couldn't work anymore, they took him away. I assumed, we all assumed without really saying anything about it, that they just took the people they knew were about to die, maybe so that they wouldn't have to keep feeding them with the rest. Which is horrible, but...not as horrible as the truth."

Steve was holding his breath by the time Monty paused. Sam guessed for him, his voice low. "They used them for medical testing, didn't they?"

"Oh, God." Steve's hand covered his mouth.

Monty nodded. "I don't know the specifics, but I'm guessing that had something to do with the, y'know, the amnesia. Have you heard of that happening somewhere else?"

Sam shook his head. "Not actually. Just historically. Bastards."

Steve thought of Bucky attacking him when he thought he might be touched, of the dull, empty look in his eyes as he retreated somewhere far inside his head after puking on the ground. The thought that any of that might be the result of damage caused by medical experiments when he was a prisoner sent through Steve's an anger so sudden and powerful he imagined it might vibrate straight through his skin.

"We saw the evidence when the rescue came," Monty said quietly. "I should have told you. I'm sorry."

"Shit," said Sam. Steve didn't have any words.

* * *

Wanda Maximova. Not too long ago, Sasha would have called her one of his best friends. Wouldn't even have hesitated to say so. Now she watched him with a cool, impassive gaze as she crossed the room, speaking in a low voice.

"I suppose you know why I'm here."

"Do _you_ know why you're here?" He asked, a sudden dread of suspicion swooping low in his stomach. Was everyone who'd worked with him in on it the whole time? Whispering among themselves about the foolish American they'd duped and then falling silent when he was in the room?

 _That's just the paranoia talking,_ his brain reminded him automatically. But was it? It seemed like any and all of his paranoid thoughts could be true at this point, and he had no sense of what was reasonable anymore. He wanted to be able to trust his team. The four of them had always relied on each other completely, every op they did together well-oiled. But how could he, when Vasily Karpov was apparently the one who'd been lying to him from the beginning? If their trusted leader could do that, he couldn't rule out that Wanda and Pietro might have been part of the whole scheme, too.

"To bring you back home," she said. "We've received intel about the man who owns this place. He's British intelligence. MI6. It isn't safe here."

"For me? Or for the Lubyanka and the GRU?"

"You've got a high opinion of your own importance, don't you? I doubt your movements are even on the GRU's radar. You're not planning on spilling any military secrets, are you, Sasha? If you even know any."

"Then why extract me? What do you think is going on here?"

She shifted, crossing her arms over her chest. "Anyone who's MI6 would surely have their place of business bugged. We can't speak freely."

And Sasha realized. She didn't know. She'd been told Falsworth was MI6 and she believed it, but she was confused about the details, too. A flood of relief loosened the strain in his chest.

But she was right about the fact that they couldn't speak freely. Falsworth's place might not have been bugged, but he knew better than to think Wanda would have shown up here without an earpiece. Reporting back to wherever the rest of the extraction team was waiting.

"Have you heard from Vasya recently?"

Her mouth flattened into a thin line. "No." The fact bothered her. But what was probably bothering her even more was the fact that Sasha was in America and she didn't know why. The chances of her admitting that were slim, though.

There was a pad of paper and a pen on the nightstand, like he often saw in hotels. He picked up the pen and wrote in small cyrillic letters, hopefully small enough that they wouldn't be legible to any cameras if there were any installed in the room.

 _There's more going on here than you realize_

She read it and looked back at him, expression unchanged. "Who else is in the house besides James Falsworth?"

"No one you'd know."

"Associates of his? Guests?"

"Did they brief you at all for this?"

"Lower your voice," she said, which Sasha took to mean not really at all. "Come on, we are going now."

Sasha hesitated. The door opened behind him.

Wanda had a gun in her hand and raised in an instant. He assumed that behind him, Natalya did as well. He didn't turn to look.

"Hey." He lifted his hands in a placating matter. Her free hand started to move, just the barest amount, but before she could get to what she was reaching for Sasha was at her side and had her arm pinned behind her back in a hammer lock. He detached the button hooked into her belt and locked his other arm across her throat so she wouldn't have room to step out of the hold. Having her press that button to let her backup swarm in right now would not be a good situation. As it was, they probably wouldn't have long before they realized something was up.

"Sasha," she hissed, her eyes wide and breath quickening a little. She was too emotional for her job. They both were. They only ever used to show it around each other, though. It gave Sasha a sliver of hope.

He shook his head, pressed close to her back. "I need time." She tried to drop her shoulder and twist out, but he tightened his hold on her wrist, yanking her arm further up her back, the metal of his fingers unyielding.

She cried out, voice ragged with frustration. "Fuck!"

"Get me time. I'll go with you, just get me time."

"There's no one coming, it's just me."

"Forgive us if we don't exactly believe you." Natalya moved further into the room.

"Why would they send you in alone?"

"Don't want to draw attention. Cause a scene. This was supposed to be a simple job." She glared at him from the corner of her eye. "Didn't think you'd _attack_ me."

"Then why were you about to call for backup?"

"It's not active! Force of habit, just a reflex."

"So they sent you in completely vulnerable." Natalya was still clearly unconvinced.

"Who are you? Your Russian is perfect. Are you with Falsworth?"

Either Wanda was playing the ignoramus or whoever sent her into this mess didn't trust her at all. Didn't they _want_ her to succeed with this extraction? Why send her in so blind?

Natalya didn't answer. The same questions were probably running through her mind.

"See?" Wanda said after a moment. "No one's coming."

And it seemed to be true. Whoever else had come along seemed content to leave them be for the moment. It was quiet. So quiet that Sasha began to wonder where the other occupants of the house were.

Wanda bit her lip. "I have a note for you."

"From who?"

"Just read it, alright? I don't know what it says. I'm just supposed to give it to you if you won't come right away."

"Where is it?"

"Inner pocket of my jacket."

Sasha unzipped her jacket and retrieved the envelope, reaching around and removing two small knives as well. He tossed them onto the bed. "Will you behave?"

"Asshole."

He released her and she glared at him but just crossed her arms over her chest. He opened the envelope and read the short, printed note before folding it back up quickly and pocketing it himself. With a slightly shaking hand he pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids. His fears were confirmed. If they both made it through this, Sasha was never going to let Dr. Erskine tell him not to be paranoid again.

"Give me a minute to say goodbye, at least."

* * *

Falsworth's room was thick with a tense sort of silence. Steve had his head in his hands in the corner and it appeared that Sam and Falsworth had been taking turns sending him worried looks. They all looked up when the other three came in, Natalya's gun still held low by her thigh, ready.

"This is Scarlet," Sasha said before anyone could ask, feeling a twinge of guilt in his chest that whatever was bothering Steve more than likely had something to do with him. "I've worked with her for years."

"Do I want to know how she got in?" Falsworth asked dryly.

"I didn't break in, though I definitely could have," Wanda said in English. "I expected better security from you."

Falsworth's brow crinkled in confusion. "I'm sorry, have we met?"

She smiled thinly. "No. My apologies."

"The Manchurian Candidate. Real nice, Sam." Everyone looked at Natalya, Sam with a grin.

"I thought so! These idiots couldn't focus long enough to get it, and then it got real sad in here and I thought it wouldn't really be funny anymore, but it is, it's still funny."

"What?" Falsworth looked from Sam to Natalya.

"The hang-man," Steve groaned, rubbing his brow.

"What is The Manchurian Candidate?" Sasha asked.

"Just a book slash movie someone made about your life," Sam answered proudly. Sasha barely heard him, suddenly distracted by a photo on Falsworth's nightstand. It was a picture of Falsworth with his arms slung around the shoulders of two other men, all three of them decked out in uniform, maroon berets perched atop their heads. He picked it up, something tugging at the back of his brain. "You were airborne force," he murmured, trying to figure out what it was.

Falsworth nodded. "I was with the Paras. One of the members of our batallion took that right before we were flown out to the Rumaylah oilfields."

Sasha looked from the photo to Falsworth's face and back. There had been a reason he'd seemed the barest bit familiar when Sasha had arrived at the house, and all at once he remembered where he had seen the man before.

"Were you in London on March 13?" The words came out more strained than he'd intended. That probably had something to do with how he suddenly couldn't seem to get enough air. Wanda straightened at his side, her posture tensing.

Falsworth's brow furrowed, thrown off. "I-yes, I was."

"What were you doing there?" The echo of his name, spoken high and frantic, somewhat tinny from filtering through the com. _Sasha!_ He flinched away from the memory.

"I-I live there, most of the time. Sarge-Aleksander, are you alright?"

"No, no, what were you doing _there_? At Guildhall?"

"You were at Guildhall?" Wanda's voice was sharp.

"Oh, March 13! There was a military banquet, a big to-do, a load of veterans from the area were invited. Hey, breathe, alright?"

Falsworth had been there. He'd _been_ there. And he'd been wearing his maroon beret.

It was supposed to be a relatively fun night as far as missions went, Wanda and Pietro had been in good spirits the whole time they got ready, because as glamorous as terms like 'secret agent' sounded, the actual number of occasions where they got to dress up fancy and drink expensive alcohol while getting paid for it was few. Most of the work they did was on the street and other unassuming places, where the goal was to look as unremarkable as possible. Here, though, to fit in you had to get all gussied up. Sasha had just watched them as Wanda applied flawless eyeliner and Pietro styled his hair in the mirror, having just put on his normal dark work clothes himself since his involvement in the event would be entirely through a scope and an earpiece, if all went well.

Things had seemed to be going well at first. Sasha couldn't see inside, but that was fine. Everything that he needed to see was set to happen outside on the square. From the com he could hear the wavery, sweet voice of the entertainment being picked up by Wanda's mic.

"No, not like that, breathe deeper, alright? Calm down, don't hyperventilate on me, Sarge."

Sasha gasped in a breath. There were hands on his shoulders. He flinched roughly away from them. "There, easy, that's better. Deep breaths." He stared wide-eyed at the blue eyes crinkled in concern in front of him.

It had been a counterintelligence mission, the objective being to feed a Turkish intelligence agent false information about Russia's plans of involvement in the conflict in Syria. He was in the belief that Wanda was a double agent, and was planning to meet up with her at the banquet. Wanda had been 'turned' by another Turk who had been doing some recruiting in Russia about a month and a half prior, offering them accurate but largely inconsequential information since then to gain their trust. This was going to be a big night, what it had all been leading up to. That was why Sasha was along, just in case. Pietro was there to keep an eye on the Turkish agent's date, a well-decorated British veteran who may have just been there to enjoy the banquet, but one could never be too sure, and in that case she would need to be distracted from her date's activities anyway.

At some point during the night he had lost focus. That was the part that he could never remember, the part that ate at him.

Towards the end of the evening a group of veterans had come out, chatting on the square outside the hall. One of them wore a maroon beret. Sasha watched them. The next thing he was fully conscious of was Wanda screaming at him through the com while Pietro bled out in an alley just off the banquet hall.

"Is this what happened when he remembered you?" Sam asked. He and Steve were standing now, too.

"Not exactly. Buck, can you hear me? Sasha?" Steve sounded distraught. "He's panicking."

Sam nodded. "It's alright, dude, you're not trapped. Do you want to sit down? Go somewhere else?"

"I'm," Sasha gasped, "fine."

As it turned out, the Turk's date wasn't just there to enjoy the banquet. She was a British military vet, but these days she was an assassin, one he'd hired to take out Pietro Maximov, who had been a little too good at recruiting in Syria over the past few months. They'd set the whole thing up, unearthing the connection between Wanda and Pietro and using her to get to him. Wanda had caught on at some point during the night, but being a guest at the banquet, hadn't been able to go in armed. Which had been the whole reason Sasha had been on call in the first place. Wanda had called for him to go to Pietro and he couldn't remember that at all. All he could remember in the haze was a maroon beret.

"That was you," he breathed. It didn't make sense yet. Nothing made sense, but he knew it was true. He hadn't been able to stop staring at the man in the maroon beret, talking and laughing with the small group on the square. It'd done something to his head.

"Could you try that again in English?" The man minus his maroon beret raised his eyebrows.

"What was him?" Wanda spoke English, her question almost accusing in its force.

"I," Sasha tried but the word turned into a hiccup. He shook his head. "I can't-"

'That's okay." The assurance was spoken by Steve's calming voice, the voice that lulled him to sleep more nights than not, and Sasha found his breathing inadvertently slowing at the sound of it. "You don't have to do anything right now, or say anything. I'm gonna help you sit down, okay?"

Sasha nodded, tensing a little at the presence of a hand on his upper back, but all it did was guide him gently over to Falsworth's bed. He sat down on the edge of it, legs trembling with the motion.

Sam waved toward the door. "Alright, everyone but Steve clear out of here."

"I think he wanted to say something to me," Falsworth protested.

"Yeah, but he can do it after he can breathe again."

"What if he doesn't remember?"

"I'm staying," Wanda said.

"Do you know what he might be talking about?" Natalya asked her. Steve was still talking to him quietly, Sasha tried to focus on that. His breaths were coming a little easier now.

"It sounds like he might've been at the same banquet I was at in March," Falsworth shook his head in wonder.

"You didn't know he was there?" Wanda asked sharply.

"No, I-no, absolutely not."

"So you didn't interact with him."

"Not at all."

"Sasha, talk to me." Wanda's hand was suddenly on his shoulder, slipping back into their native tongue. He glanced up to see her face was pale, her mouth a tight line. He winced.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"I don't want to hear that you're sorry, I want to know what you were talking about."

"Why?" Natalya broke in in English. "What was he doing at the banquet?"

Wanda looked at her warily. "Work," she shrugged. "Or he was supposed to be, anyway. I was there, too."

"But why do you–"

"She wants to know because I killed her brother that night." Natalya's question died unfinished on her tongue. Five pairs of eyes stared at Sasha. He kept his gaze on Wanda. "That's how you see it, right?"

Her head shook a little, but it wasn't a denial. "I don't want to do this right now, with all of them."

"Oh, I thought you did."

"Hold on, someone _died_ at the banquet?" Falsworth's eyes were wide. "Or was this after?"

"I don't know how to explain it all to you right now, Scarlet." Sasha swiped sightly shaking hands down his face. "I'm barely starting to piece it together myself."

"Of course." Her words were bitter. "You can never explain it, and I just have to live with that."

"This is the mission that went wrong." Steve's face was grave. After a moment Sasha met his eye and nodded.

"I was supposed to keep the two of them safe," he said dully. "But then I saw Falsworth and I think a similar thing must have happened as in that alley by the breakfast place. In the meantime, he was shot with a PSS."

It was starting to make sense. Some part of him must have recognized Falsworth that night, just like with Steve, in that alley. If his reaction to remembering something from that void before the POW camp was anything like what Steve and Natalya had described, it was no wonder why he hadn't been able to have eyes and ears where he was supposed to that night… and why he could never quite remember what had happened afterward. It was Falsworth's fault that Pietro…

No. No. It was Sasha's fault that Pietro was dead, no one else's. He couldn't go blaming his own failures on this man who'd just been a guest at the party.

He didn't want to see their faces. He could imagine them well enough, the somewhat stunned, mostly grim, partly awkward looks of people who didn't really know how to react. He made the mistake of glancing at Falsworth anyway, which was obviously the worst person he could have picked out of the bunch. The Brit looked positively sick. "What happened in the alley by the breakfast place?" Wanda sounded like she was struggling to keep her tone even.

"It will take a lot of explanation to make sense," he said apologetically. "I'll explain everything on the way back, everything, I promise." He thumped his chest with his fist to show he meant it.

She was already shaking her head before he finished, like she couldn't believe herself for having expected anything from him. A tight, watery laugh left her throat and she blinked rapidly. "God, Aleksander, you better."

"You're leaving," Steve said. It was hard to look at him. It was always hard to look at Steve, but especially now. Sasha had chalked it up to guilt, but the muted ache at the back of his head as he looked at him now made him wonder if it was something more. Maybe his brain was trying to remember. Maybe it was trying not to.

"I have to." The envelope in his pocket might as well have been made of lead. "I came to say goodbye to all of you and–to thank you. Could I–could I actually talk with you for a second, Steve?"

The blond straightened a little. "Of course."

They were barely back in the room where Sasha had briefly entertained the idea of sleep when Steve spoke up. "I'll go with you."

Sasha's expression softened. This guy was really crazy. "Oh, did you happen to bring your Russian visa?"

He didn't look embarrassed. "I'm not even asking you to stay and be my friend again, or whatever, I'm just really concerned about these people you work for."

"Yeah, well. You're probably right to be. Believe me, I don't wanna go just yet either, but," his hand strayed to the pocket of his jacket, "they're threatening my therapist if I don't go with Scarlet now."

Steve looked stricken. "Who is?"

"I don't know." He swallowed. "I have my suspicions, but… I don't know."

"Okay. Well." Steve took a deep breath, seeming at a loss. He had the look of a man who didn't admit defeat easily and hated it now. "I won't interfere, then."

"Thanks, for, um… back there. Talking me down, or whatever. It was just, I've never been able to remember what happened that night, and then everyone just kept talking, and it was all just…"

Steve waved his hand to stop him. "It was nothing. I know what it's like to not be able to breathe. It's not fun."

Sasha shook his head with a small, grateful smile. "No," he agreed. "You're a good person, Steve Rogers. I would have liked to get to know you."

Steve laughed a little, a sad sound. It made Sasha's heart ache for him. "I've never claimed to be particularly interesting, I've mainly just got interesting friends."

"Well, in my experience, interesting people don't really bother with having dull friends."

The laugh that brought was slightly less tragic, making Sasha feel pretty good about himself. "I would have liked to get to know you too, Sasha. The person you are now seems just as much someone I'd want to know as the one you were before."

And God, that was just a bit too earnest for Sasha to stand. Before he could get too awkward and psych himself out of it he found himself tugging Steve into a hug. The blond clapped him once on the back before returning it full force.

"This isn't over, though," Sasha assured.

He felt the body wrapped around his sag a little in relief. "You're damn right it's not."

* * *

While Bucky said his goodbyes to Monty, Steve hung back in the bedroom. He'd asked if there was any way they could stay in contact and had insisted on giving Bucky his number, but he had a bad feeling about it.

It didn't help when Scarlet slipped silently into the room. "Hello."

Steve didn't bother with pleasantries. "You'll take care of him?"

Her green eyes just held their gaze. "I suppose it depends upon your cooperation. I have a message to tell one of you, from my boss."

"Who's your boss? Karpov?"

It was unclear whether that name meant anything to her at all. She was good, all right. "That's cute. That's a nice try."

"What's the message?"

"My boss says that if either you or your friends here tell a word of what happened this weekend to anyone, then," she paused for a moment as if she was listening to something, then very nearly rolled her eyes, "then it will be seen to that Sasha would rather wish he were dead. That's rather dramatic, but I'm guessing it won't go well for Sasha. God, what did Sasha _do_ this weekend? I guess don't answer that, or Sasha will wish he was dead." She paused again and then sighed. "I have been advised to stick to the original message without all the unnecessary commentary."

Steve felt cold. "I can't say I'm a big fan of the way your boss operates. It doesn't sound very professional."

"You'll relay the message to your friends?"

He scrubbed a hand down his face. "I'll relay the message." There was no way they were giving up on this, though. They couldn't.

* * *

Waiting in a car a good ways off from the house was none other than Vasily Karpov. Sasha wished he was more surprised. So much for Wanda not having heard from him.

The brunet man immediately pulled him into a hug and kissed him thrice on the cheek. "Good to have you back, Sasha."

Sasha, stiff in his arms, asked the only question that mattered. "Why?"

Vasily pulled back, hands still on his shoulders. He looked at him seriously. "Because you needed help, and I could give it to you."

"But why lie? And where's the doctor?"

"All in good time, my friend. Let's get in the car, yeah? I'll explain everything once we're back. I'm sure your head is full of wild conjectures at the moment. I can get it all straightened out."

"Oy oy, did you do something, Vasily Aleksandrovich?" Wanda clicked her tongue.

"Yes, Sasha is mad at me." He pouted as he got in the driver's seat. "I do appreciate you not boring Wanda with the details, Sasha, it makes things easier."

"Don't keep too much to yourself, Vasya, it's bad for your health." Wanda prodded Sasha into the backseat.

"Vasily," he demanded, arms crossed over his chest. The man looked at him in the rearview mirror.

"Trust me, Sasha. Can you do that for me?"

"Apparently not."

"Ah, Sasha doesn't trust anyone, does he? And he can't be trusted with anything, either." Wanda's words were teasing, but he knew she meant them, and he also knew that her anger at him would not put her in a position to listen to anything that he might have to say right now.

Vasily kept the conversation up fairly well all the way to the airport, talking about nothing in particular, as far as Sasha was concerned. He treated the both of them with stony silence the whole way.

"Now, I heard you telling Wanda that you'd explain what happened in March on the way back, and there'll definitely be time for that. I'd like to hear it too, if you feel up to sharing. But keep in mind that this is a commercial flight and we can't exactly be talking about that out in the open."

"Obviously." Sasha hoisted his bag onto his shoulder as they were called to board.

It was a tense flight. All Sasha could do was worry and try to tune out the conversations around him. Once he got back to Moscow, he would try and make sure that Dr. Erskine got out of Vasily's reach and was safe and then maybe he could get back to America again. But who might Vasily threaten next? Wanda? Just how heartless was the man who'd always been his closest friend? Every circling thought turned his stomach.

Touching ground back at Sheremetyevo Airport at last, the two men said goodbye to Wanda as she and Vasily had driven there separately, but not before a stern reminder that Sasha owed her an explanation. "I promised, didn't I?" he assured her, and then she was gone.

Vasily's Renault Duster was parked close to customs. Sasha's shoulders were sagging by the time they got there, his left arm an uncomfortable strain on his back. He dumped his bag in the back and then slid into the passenger side, ready to see his bed already and worry about a game plan and the matter of the lie that was his life tomorrow.

As soon as his door slammed shut, something sharp poked into the side of his neck. He only had time to yelp in alarm before he felt his head grow heavy and his vision went black.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: This chapter is long. I couldn't find a good place to split it up, so you get the whole thing!

*Warning for ableist comments relating to brain damage.

* * *

Natasha found Steve in the kitchen, nursing a glass of pink liquid. He opened the fridge.

"Lemonade? I think it's raspberry. It's really good, actually."

She nodded. "Thanks."

Steve took out the pitcher and poured her a glass. "Weird weekend, huh?"

"I wanted to do something." She held the glass in both her hands and looked down at it. "I wanted to stop him from going, to help him get out, but he still has loyalties. You can't change someone's mind on such a short deadline."

He shook his head. "It's not that. He told me, it was just like you were thinking. They used his therapist against him. However the doctor found out about what was going on, however he tracked down Falsworth, it landed him in trouble."

She leaned against the counter next to him, her shoulder close to his bicep. "I got Darcy to fill in for me tomorrow. She might not be the most technically-focused instructor, but the kids love her. If you don't wanna make the drive back just yet, you won't be alone. I'm taking the day off either way."

He smiled close-lipped. "Thank you, Natasha. I don't know if we should impose on Monty, though."

"I think all things considered, he might not mind."

"I probably shouldn't cancel my sessions."

"I imagine your clients will forgive you. Skipping back and shoulders day once never made anybody fat."

"Now that's just not true."

She smiled a little and finally took a sip of lemonade. "We have the bastard's name, if it's a real one. Even if it's not, Clint might be able to find something, either on him or on Bucky. Clint'll be back soon, maybe even tomorrow. He texted me, said they were closing in."

"That's good."

She bumped her shoulder into his arm and then slid her arm around his waist, pulling him into her side. Steve managed to hold out for another five seconds before he gave in. He leaned his cheek on her head and let the tears come.

* * *

" _Blin_."

"No big deal, just reload and try again."

"I have been doing for the past forty minutes, Vasya. I'm getting worse."

"Just one more time."

Sasha grunted and then reloaded, aiming at the far target and closing his eyes, taking a deep breath and opening them again. He kept breathing, waiting until it wasn't quite so shaky. On the next exhale, he paused halfway through the release of air and pulled. The shot hit at the bottom of the 7.

He was using an M66 Combat Magnum for the sole reason that it was a piece of cake to shoot accurately. It was built on a K-frame, easy to control. And yet.

"It's just psychological. Your left hand's solid as a rock. Your right one's a wreck on its own, but the other one's making up for it."

"My breathing sucks, too." He knew it was psychological. Knowing that didn't help a bit. It was maddening, because it wasn't like he'd been the one to shoot Pietro. Holding and shooting a gun shouldn't be this much of an ordeal, if all of this was supposedly stemming from that incident.

"I could put you on some counterintelligence assignments like Wanda's doing," Vasya suggested, but he looked a little doubtful. "You can still fight better than most, if the need arises."

"That's not what you hired me for."

"No, but I think you're trained enough for it. You might even still be able to kill. Close combat. No guns needed."

"Only if I have to."

"Of course."

"And if I can't?"

Vasya shrugged. "It could be bad. We could maybe withdraw without it being too messy."

"Probably not, though."

He bumped his shoulder against Sasha's. "Come on, let's go work on knives."

They went to store their guns. "I'm sorry," Sasha said. Vasya shook his head, waving it off.

"Don't be. You're doing fine. I'm proud of you."

"Thought I might find you two here." Sasha started. Wanda was down the hall, walking towards them. "Do you have some time?"

He looked at Vasya, but when his gaze fell back on Wanda she was looking at him. He raised his eyebrows. "Are you talking to me now?"

"Obviously." She rocked on her toes. "So do you?"

He shrugged and nodded, following her out. This could be interesting.

"Finally tracked you down."

"You've been looking for me?"

"Yes, for the past few days."

He shrugged. "I've been around." She led him out to the parking lot and to her car. "Are we going somewhere?" he asked.

"No." She unlocked it. "Get in." Sasha hesitated for the barest second, though he couldn't say why exactly. Once she was in the driver's seat, just waiting, he opened the door.

"So?" She started once the door was closed behind him. "Let's hear it."

"Hear what?"

"Don't give me that, Sasha."

"I'm sorry?"

"You know what!" She smacked her hand against the bottom of the steering wheel. "God, you are unbelievable." He just looked at her, eyes wide and hopefully conveying the extent to which he did not know what.

She pursed her lips and let out a long breath through her mouth as if praying for patience. "Explain to me what happened March 13. Why you didn't come when I called."

His eyebrows drew together, his heart plummeting into his stomach. "Wanda…" Why was she doing this? "We've been over this. I can't remember any of it, you know that. You know I'd do worse than kill to be able to remember."

She stared at him a moment longer like she couldn't believe what she was hearing, before her expression turned icy. "Get out."

"Wanda." He put his hand on her arm. She slapped it away.

"I hate you!" Her voice was jagged.

"Wanda, I'm-"

" _Get out of my car!_ "

He did. As soon as he'd closed the door he could see her shoulders shaking. He backed away, almost stumbling over the asphalt.

* * *

His alarm hadn't gone off that morning. When he'd woken up it was too light out, and Sasha sat up quickly, swiping at his phone. It was already past 8.

"Shit." He tumbled gracefully out of bed, sifting through his contacts. "Shit, shit, shit." To shower, or to brush his teeth? He hardly had time for both. Maybe brush his teeth in the shower. He swayed a little on his feet as it rang. Waking up late made him disoriented. His phone seemed cleaner. "Filippa Mikhailovna, I am so sorry. My alarm. I'll be there in twenty minutes, I promise, and I–my hair!"

Filippa made some confused question on the other end. He swiped his hand down his neck again, pulled at the top of his head, then stumbled into the bathroom.

"–that you weren't going to come in today."

He stared at himself in the mirror, his mouth falling open. "What?"

"You cancelled your classes for today."

He frowned at the phone then put it back to his ear. "No, I have systema right now, and then BJJ."

"Well, you don't have any students."

"Who cancelled my classes?"

"You did. We weren't expecting you back until the 16th." He heard the sound of typing on the other end and then she said, "Oh, my mistake, I see the email now, so we can expect you back tomorrow?"

"Uh. Yes. Expect me back tomorrow."

"Glad to hear it, Aleksander Vazhevich."

He hung up and redialed, glancing in his trash can for clippings. It was empty. The ringing stopped, and he heard a click. He spoke before Vasya could say anything.

"Did we go out last night?"

"We most certainly did."

Sasha shook his head, still swiping his hand over the top of it. "I do not remember that at all."

"Honestly I can't remember the last time I've seen you get quite so trashed. Don't worry, I didn't let you do anything too idiotic."

"Except cut all my hair off and cancel my classes for the next two weeks!"

"Oh, well, yes, except for that. But we got the class thing sorted out, don't worry about that."

He pressed his thumb and forefinger into his temple, screwing his eyes shut. "Explains the headache. God, I'm never drinking that much again. Or at all. You know how much I hate not remembering things."

"I do. I'll cut you off next time."

He sighed. "Whose phone am I using?"

"Yours. You dropped your old one off Patriarshy Bridge. Luckily Gemini was nearby and always open. Couldn't keep your same number, though."

Good grief. "Good thing only like five people had that number."

"I was about to head to the range, if your head can stand it. It's been a while since we've gotten a session in."

"Yeah, why not. It wasn't gonna be a good morning, anyway."

* * *

"Vasily Karpov. Got his bachelor's in biomedical engineering at MIPT, or PhysTech as the cool kids call it, then a master's in neuroscience. It's unclear if he ever did anything with either. Looks like he started a PhD program but never finished it, in favor of enrolling in the FSB Academy. All of this was a while ago, though, there's nothing recent on him."

"Still a lot more than what Google came up with." Steve took the offered paper, his eyes drilling holes through the few lines of text, as if they would offer up more than what Clint had just read off if he stared at them hard enough. "Thanks, Clint."

"Odd areas of study for someone who wants to go into federal intelligence," Nat mused. "I wonder what brought on the career shift."

"Early midlife crisis?" Clint shrugged. "As for the other two, the first name 'Scarlet' isn't much to go on, but there's no indication of a connection between anyone with that name and Karpov. Could be below our radar, could be a fake name. Alexander Volkov, on the other hand, is a Russian MMA fighter known commonly by the pseudonym 'Drago.'"

"Common name?" Steve guessed.

"Yeah, but one with no recorded connection to the FSB. If that's really the name he's using, he's not on the books."

Steve sagged a little against the wall. He wasn't sure what that might mean. It could be that they'd never entered him into whatever system they had because everything about Bucky was illegal. But how many people knew that? Was it just Karpov acting alone, and everyone else thought Bucky was legit? Or did they all know and just didn't care?

He pulled out his phone for the thousandth time in the past two days. He'd sent off a text to Bucky the day after he'd gone, but so far with no results.

"You're gonna drive yourself crazy with that thing," Nat warned.

"I'm worried." He shoved the phone back in his pocket, his hand with it. "Maybe I shouldn't have given him my number. He might've gotten in trouble for it. And maybe we shouldn't have dragged you into it, Clint. After what Scarlet said–"

"There's no way they can know that we told him." Nat's voice was firm and calm. "They're just trying to scare you, because they're scared of us getting them in trouble. There's nothing they can really do to stop us, so their best bet is to intimidate us into silence."

He felt a little like a scared child being comforted by his mother that there were no monsters in the closet. But Natasha was the one who was usually paranoid about bugs, and they'd checked his apartment twice over. They hadn't found any, and no one involved in this had ever even been in Steve's apartment. He tried to be reassured.

"Right." He swallowed. "As long as we don't make a big public stink until we know he's safe." If only there was some way to get a hold of him. He'd told Steve this wasn't over. Steve just had to trust that he wasn't giving up on getting back here.

* * *

Work quickly started running Sasha ragged, or maybe it was just being awake that was doing that. The kids at the martial arts academy were about as cooperative as usual, so he couldn't really blame it on them. In his apartment (one of the few Khruschoba still standing in Moscow, though every day he half-expected to find a notice from the city calling for the demolition of the crappy Soviet-era building), he sprawled out on his bed with his pillow bunched up in half under his head, set a reminder on his phone to see Vasya for overhaul on his arm, and opened Youtube.

Still no new video from SteveGRogers.

It wasn't the end of the world; he could just watch one of his old ones like he'd been doing for the past week and a half or so. Still, it was disappointing. The channel was supposed to post every Tuesday and Friday and had always been pretty consistent about it in the past.

He picked one of his favorites–a painting of sunset over the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York skyline silhouetted behind it–and slipped his earbuds in.

* * *

The kids sat spread out on the floor, their feet flat on the ground in front of them.

"Alright, we're gonna do backward break falls. Arms crossed over the chest, chin tucked. Count out loud."

They started rocking themselves back, the rhythmic sound of their hands slapping the mat echoing in time with their counting. Their counts sounded feebler than usual, especially for so early in the class.

"I'm not sensing a lot of energy in the room today," Sasha called out as they kept drilling. "Are we tired already?" That got their voices to ring out louder for about five seconds before they faded to even more pitiful than before. Once they finished their set of twenty, most of them just stayed lying face up on the mat instead of sitting back up to be ready for whatever was coming next, like they usually did.

"Alright," he said after the next set was even feebler, brow furrowing. "Is there something wrong? Some virus sucking the drive out of my hard workers?" They shook their heads, the kids on the ground sitting up, all of them looking at him with wide eyes like they were afraid of being punished. "I know fundamentals aren't the most fun, but we've got to get through them to get to the fun stuff." At that the kids just looked at one another, silently communicating or commiserating over something Sasha didn't understand. After a beat, one of the older kids snaked his hand into the air.

Sasha nodded to him. "Rudy."

"Are we doing the exercise wrong, Professor?"

"You're not doing it wrong. You're all looking at me like I'm torturing you, I'm just looking for more energy."

Rudy just fidgeted, looking like he wanted to say more. When Sasha didn't move on, holding his gaze, he spoke up again, sounding sheepish, like he didn't know if he should be saying what he was.

"I just thought we must be doing something wrong, because you're having us drill it so many times."

"What are you talking about? I've had you do two sets of break falls."

The kids all looked at each other again. "We've been drilling break falls for forever," piped up one of the younger kids, Anna.

Sasha frowned, looking around at the other students to see if they were all trying to pull one over on him. Was he going crazy? "Is that true?"

They nodded, seeming encouraged that someone else had spoken up about it. "Usually we would have partnered off a long time ago."

He looked at the clock. They were twenty minutes in. Holy shit. Maybe he was going crazy. How could they have been drilling forever? He could have sworn they'd just done it twice.

"Is everything okay, Professor?" Anna asked.

He swallowed and nodded, figuring the only thing he could do right at the moment was move on. "Everything's fine, Anna. Okay, done with warm-ups, then. Everybody pair up. Remember, we've been focusing on limb control. Position before submission doesn't have to mean you've got to wait until you have control over your opponent's entire core. A single arm or leg can be enough, and sometimes it has to be. Everyone ready?"

* * *

"Ah, shit."

"What happened?" Steve called from the living room. Nat and Clint had come over to play board games, because one of them might've been an ex-spy and the other might still currently be working for a vague yet menacing agency, but they were still boring adults when it came down to it. Steve used to comfort himself that he wasn't a thousand times more boring than his friends with the fact that Clint was trying to recruit him as an agent every other time they hung out. See, it wasn't that Steve was inherently boring, he was just choosing to stay out of that lifestyle. These days, though, he was wishing his life was a little less interesting. The stress of not knowing if Bucky was okay, of not being able to contact him, was wearing on him.

His friends had been meeting in Steve's apartment any time they got together, understanding his unspoken reluctance to talk about anything to do with the entire situation in an apartment that was probably bugged by Clint's job. Steve was grateful, because although it was getting frustrating just throwing back and forth the few things they knew without knowing what they could do about it right then, he also wouldn't like to feel like he _couldn't_ talk about it.

"I dropped my pizza!" Clint lamented. Steve rounded the corner to see the slice, face down on the linoleum, his friend staring down at it morosely. He clapped a hand on Clint's shoulder.

"I just wanna thank you for being here with me, and for me, in this dark time," Clint said, covering Steve's hand with his own. "Would you like to say a few words, on this the saddest day?"

"You're gonna eat it anyway."

Clint nodded, solemn. "I'm gonna eat it anyway," he repeated profoundly. He patted Steve's hand. "Thank you."

"Are you planning on joining me?" Natasha asked as Clint picked up his pizza, coming up behind him and resting her forehead in the small of his back. Steve always felt most like a third wheel when Clint was fresh from a mission, because as much as she might deny it, Nat always got a little clingy. He grabbed them all some drinks and then they were off to battle it out in Clue.

They played this game partly for the fascination of the experience, because although Clint was employed by some shadowy intelligence agency, the most mysterious thing Steve knew about him, or anybody, for that matter, was that he was undefeated at Clue. Steve didn't understand it, but after watching him closely enough times to be satisfied that he wasn't cheating, he couldn't help but have the highest respect for it. It didn't stop him from trying to dethrone him every time.

Playing with a master did make for frustrating games, though. Nat, who operated under no illusion that she might ever win, got bored and chatty pretty soon.

"Are you still working on your visa?"

Steve nodded. "I got the tourist invitation. But unfortunately you need a passport before you can get a visa, so I'm still waiting on that."

"And you're sure you don't just want me to go? I could do it, Steve. Right now."

He shook his head. She sounded like she already knew he was gonna say no, anyway. "I don't want you getting mixed up over there in something that could be dangerous for you. It's not as risky for me. I know," he said with a pointed look when she opened her mouth, "that you'd be careful, that you're professionally trained to be careful, but I couldn't live with myself. Please." He knew that if she decided to go anyway there'd be nothing he could do to stop her, so he hoped she understood that the thought of her old demons catching up to her because she'd been trying to help him was just too much for him to bear. He was already losing enough sleep as it was.

He was relieved when she nodded, using her turn to peek at one of Clint's cards. "I hope the doctor's okay."

The doctor. He'd been so caught up worrying about Bucky that he'd forgotten about the doctor. God, he was a terrible person. But all guilt aside, there might actually be something there. "We never looked into who he is, how he might have known about all of this."

"But we don't know his name, do we?" Nat asked, passing the dice.

"Erskine," Steve muttered, pulling out his phone.

She straightened. "Erskine, right! I'd completely forgotten."

He punched 'erskine moscow therapist' into Google while Clint and Nat abandoned their cards in favor of hovering around him to see. It didn't immediately come up with much.

"Change the ccTLD." Clint pointed at the address bar.

"Oh, right." Steve went to google dot ru and tried again, then handed the phone to Natasha.

She smiled. "Abraham Erskine, licensed professional therapist. Can't be that many therapists in Moscow with the name Erskine, right?"

"What's his background?" Steve asked. She scrolled.

"He got his master's at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, then taught a bunch of various brain-related subjects listed here at MIPT for several years before becoming a therapist. Seems like kind of a downgrade if you ask me."

"MIPT. That's where Karpov went."

"Small world."

"Or that's how they know each other."

"If they know each other. Should we give him a call?" She didn't wait for an answer before hitting the number. The phone was only up to her ear for a few moments before she shook her head. "Number is no longer in use."

"That's kind of what I expected," Steve said. It was still disappointing, though.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"It doesn't necessarily mean something terrible," Clint said. "Could be an old listing."

"I don't see another way to get a hold of him…" Nat scrolled up and down the short listing. "No email or anything. I guess this is more of a therapist phone directory."

Another way… Steve worried his bottom lip, tapping his stubby pencil against his knee. Another way to get a hold of someone.

He sat up straight, his pencil stilling.

"I know how to contact Bucky."

* * *

 _what to do if you start having short-term memory problems_

Sasha glanced over his shoulder quickly before starting to scroll through the hits on his phone. Vasya was in the cafe's bathroom, but he would be back before too long. Sasha had met him here for a light dinner after work, but what had happened in his first class had been bothering him all day and he couldn't quite wait until he was home to do something about it. Or at least, to feel like he was doing something about it.

A lot of the hits had to do with Alzheimer's. He added ' _young_ ' to the end of the search.

The possible causes offered were medications, alcoholism… not likely to be those. Whatever had happened that night he'd gone out drinking with Vasya was not exactly a habit. Emotional factors like stress or anxiety, head injury, sleep deprivation...well. That made sense. Maybe he shouldn't be surprised this was happening.

Vitamin B-12 deficiency. Wouldn't that be something.

The general recommendation was if memory loss is a concern, see a doctor. Of course. Only, he'd really rather not if he didn't have to. The only reason he'd agreed to start seeing Dr. Erskine in the first place was because Vasya knew him and had assured Sasha that the man wouldn't commit him to an asylum. But now Dr. Erskine had left him. Gone to practice in Germany. It wasn't uncommon, plenty of Russian psychiatrists and therapists left to practice in places where the mental health industry wasn't in crisis. And Erskine was German, anyway. Sasha just wished he'd had a bit of warning.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?"

Sasha quickly turned off his screen, before realizing that the person who had spoken probably wouldn't have been able to read it if that was the question they were asking. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

A woman, he'd guess 26 or 27, stood in front of him smiling expectantly. "Yes," he said in English. He tried not to jump to any conclusions Dr. Erskine wouldn't be proud of.

"Do you have a Russian phone number? The Wi-Fi is asking for a phone number but it doesn't like my country code." She spoke with an English accent, though not a pure one, underneath it was remnants of her first language. Maybe Japanese; this cafe did have several Japanese dishes she might be missing from home.

Sasha didn't really want to give her his phone number. But if he gave her a fake, it might not let her on to the Wi-Fi. "Yeah, no problem." He gave her Vasya's number.

"Thank you!"

A moment after she'd sat back down in her seat across the cafe, Vasya was back. "Green shirt, bun, East Asian." His voice was low. Sasha was still looking at her.

"What about her?"

"Your new target."

Sasha's skin prickled. "Why?"

Vasya seemed to be trying to read his expression. "She's been making some dangerous connections. Also, she cheated on my cousin."

He tore his eyes away from her to glare at Vasya. "I'm not your own personal hitman."

His friend tilted his head. "Aren't you? I don't see your paychecks coming from the state."

"You don't pay me to kill, you pay me to protect." Granted, in the line of protecting their agents and state officials, occasionally it wound up being the same thing.

"I know that, Sasha."

He glowered. "Is she even a red flag?"

Vasya grinned. "No. No idea who she is. She's cute, though, isn't she?"

Sasha shook his head. He wasn't in the mood for this. "Guess so. Then I guess you'll be glad she already has your number."

"What?"

He pushed his chair back. He'd finished eating, anyway. "She needed one to connect to the Internet."

"You're leaving? You're not upset about the joke, are you?"

He shook his head again, standing. "It's just been a weird day. I'm gonna go… buy some vitamins."

"Vitamins?"

"Tell Wanda hi from me. And that I'm sorry. Unless you think it would upset her."

He left and headed straight for his apartment.

The most obvious thing to try to fix was sleep deprivation. The thing was, he'd already been trying to fix that for months, with little success. It was still early, and he probably wouldn't be able to get to sleep for several hours at least, but he was so exhausted. More than usual, even.

Eventually, after cleaning his entire bathroom, he deemed it an acceptable time to at least start trying.

No position on his bed was comfortable. His sheets stuck to him even though it wasn't all that warm. He pictured his brain running a marathon, dropping things every few kilometers to lighten the load, but it didn't make it run any faster, it just left it feeling like it was missing something it needed for the race.

He groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. It hadn't quite been a dream, but his mind had definitely seemed to be wandering in that direction. Too bad he was fully conscious again. He gave in and picked up his phone off the nightstand.

SteveGRogers had a new video.

He sat up, before realizing that wasn't the most conducive position to fall asleep in, and lay back down. It had been weeks since there'd been a new video.

By the time the video was done, though, he was sitting upright in bed again, all thoughts of sleep forgotten. He played it back so he could actually listen to the words this time.

* * *

The edges of the photo were curled just a little where it laid on his desk. Steve didn't often draw straight from photos, but he needed this particular drawing to look as true to life as possible. He opened up his tin of colored pencils, hit record on his camera, and got started.

"So today's drawing is pretty special to me. It's a fond memory of mine." He penciled in the outlines of the shapes with a light stroke, using his hardest graphite at first so the lines could be easily changed. "So if you're not interested in hearing about my life, feel free to find something else to watch, I won't be offended. I won't even know. But I'm gonna get a little personal in this video. It's a little sad, real nostalgic. Bear with me, if you choose to keep watching.

"I'm drawing from a photograph today, taken during the summer after my buddy and I graduated high school. My nineteenth birthday, to be exact. At that point my buddy Bucky, who is this outline right here, had been living with me and my ma for a little over a year. It was a really hard year. Bucky's dad, who was raising him by himself at the time, was killed in a car accident, so understandably Bucky was dealing with a lot. But it was a good year, too, and maybe I say that a little selfishly because I got to live with my best friend.

"Anyway, on my nineteenth birthday, my ma took the two of us out to Coney Island. We'd all been there and to Luna Park several times before over the years, early on just me and my ma, and then when I was older just with my friends, but we'd never gone the three of us together before."

He put down his graphite pencil and picked out some of the colored ones. "Now you might've noticed that there's just two teenagers in my picture and no one else, and that's because my ma took the original photo. She was left out of a lot of pictures because she was always the one who insisted on taking them, but she never seemed to mind. Said she didn't look good in front of a camera anyway, which is not true, for the record.

"Behind us over here you can see the base of the Astro Tower, which was Bucky's favorite ride because he's a maniac. We'd just gotten off of it. Now I can do roller coasters all day, and have only thrown up on one once, an incident which Bucky used to like to bring up as often as possible. I still say there was something not right about that hotdog. Anyway, my point is, I love roller coasters, but rides like the Astro Tower are just not fun to me. I don't like that feeling of being in free fall, my stomach just flips worse than any roller coaster I've been on. But I did it because Bucky loved it, and right here in this picture I'm feelin' real proud of having done it.

"Now as I keep adding color to this I'm gonna tell you why this particular day is so special to me. As far as birthdays went, it was a good one, yeah. It was a fun day. But the whole day I was trying to memorize everything that was happening, too, because Bucky was leaving for basic training soon and I knew that it was my last birthday before everything would be different. I was a little resentful that I was being left behind just because I had a history of asthma and they wouldn't take me, but that day I was just thinking about how much I'd miss him. And it turns out that it was maybe a good thing, staying behind, because soon after Bucky left, my ma got sick, and I was able to be with her. So this is also one of my last stand-out memories of when my ma was healthy, because she was sick for more than a year after this before the illness beat her." He cleared his throat but didn't pause the stroke of his pencil. He'd known what he planned to talk about while he was making this drawing; he'd mentally prepared for it. "Sorry, like I said, it's a little sad, and unfortunately gets worse before it gets a little better. I saw Bucky briefly after he came back from basic, but then he was off to his base and later on, off to invade Iraq. Then about seven months after my ma passed, I got the notice that Bucky was gone, too. So yeah, that was pretty much the worst year of my life by a long shot.

"I don't say all this to make you all depressed, I'm just trying to express why this moment means so much to me. Doing stupid shit with my best friend, my ma calling us her 'brave boys' as she snapped the photo even though we were legally adults. The two of them are my family. Maybe one day I'll draw my ma for you, 'cause she really was beautiful."

He continued drawing in silence for a few minutes, focusing on getting Bucky's distinctive features exactly right, because if he wasn't recognizable then this whole video was a bit pointless. Once he moved back to shading his own blond hair, he started talking again. "One good thing that came out of it all was, when I was going through some of the worst of it I got involved with a program at the VA that was aimed at the family and friends of veterans and soldiers, and met one of my current best friends. He was actually the one who came up with the idea for this channel. I used to draw a lot as a kid but I hadn't really done it consistently for several years. It's been good, being able to draw for you guys and talk to you guys, even if it kind of just feels like talking to myself. I always am a little bit surprised whenever someone leaves a comment. Surprised in a good way, I mean."

* * *

On the screen, Steve Rogers's hand finally put down the pencil. "I think that about does it, huh? It could use some fleshing out, sure, and maybe I'll do that later, but I kind of like it simple like this. Thanks for staying with me 'til the end. I hope you have a good night."

Sasha's eyes bore into the screen. The drawing showed two teenage boys, a brunet kid with his arm thrown around a blond kid. The blond kid was laughing at something while the brunet, Bucky apparently, cheesed at the camera.

Sasha turned and looked in the mirror on the back of his door. He put on a big stupid smile like the brunet in the picture, then looked back at his phone, the smile dropping. It was weird. A little too weird for his heart to beat entirely normally. He didn't know what he'd looked like as a teenager, but this guy looked enough like Sasha did in his early twenties to guess that it wasn't far off from that.

He tapped out of Youtube and took out his headphones. That video did the opposite of help him sleep. Sure, doppelgangers were a thing, but still, it was unnerving. Looked like it was gonna be a long night.

* * *

The next day while running with Vasya, he passed out cold on the track. When he came to he was leaned in a sitting position up against the wall, Vasya's concerned grey eyes staring at him.

He blinked and looked around in confusion, his head throbbing. The building was empty save the two of them. "What happened?"

Vasya held his water bottle out to him. He took it gratefully. "You just… collapsed." Sasha rubbed lightly at the part of his head that hurt. Vasya's eyes followed the movement. "Careful. I think you hit your head."

"Should I go to a doctor?"

"No," Vasya said quickly. Sasha winced at him. "You don't want them to diagnose you with some crazy thing. They might commit you."

"The other day in class, I blanked out. Just completely forgot that I'd been drilling my kids in warm-ups; they had to tell me and they never go against what I say so it must've been for a long-ass time."

Vasya looked taken aback at that, but shook his head. "Even more reason."

Sasha splashed some water on his face and then cocked an eyebrow at his friend. "Well, you studied neurology, didn't you? What the fuck do you think's wrong with me?"

"I think… you've had a hard time ever since Chechnya."

"It's never been this bad, though, has it?"

"Maybe you need to get more sleep."

He took another swig of water, nodding absently. That was definitely true, but it wasn't like he wasn't trying. Sleeping pills would be amazing, but it'd probably be too risky to try and get some of those. Dr. Erskine had always encouraged other methods first, anyway.

"I think we should call that a day, huh?" Vasya offered him a hand up. He took it.

* * *

The night was particularly humid, the air heavy and sticky and the streets quieter than usual, likely due not only to the oppressive atmosphere but also in anticipation of the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, which was the next day. Wanda was making herself a cup of tea after a long day of paperwork when there was a knock at the door of her apartment.

She pressed her eye up to the peephole. Sasha was standing there, wiping his hands on his pants and shoving them in his pockets then bringing them back out again. She hesitated a moment before unlocking and opening the door just a sliver.

"What?"

"Can I come in?" Sasha's hands were back in his pockets again. He sounded like he expected to be denied. "I need someone to talk to, and I just...don't know where else to go."

Wanda considered him, her lips pressed together in a thin line. She'd been dodging his calls, but it was a little harder to slam a door right in his face, especially when he was looking so pitiful.

She opened the door. He smiled gratefully and toed off his shoes. The slippers she kept for guests were next to the door, and she nudged them towards him with the side of her own slippered foot.

"Thank you," he said, sliding into them as she closed the door behind him.

"Did you see the candles on the river?" Wanda had been entranced by them on the way home. There were 1418 of them along the bank of the Moskva, one for each day of the Great Patriotic War.

He nodded. She was still getting used to seeing him with this haircut; he hadn't had it short in a few years. He might look younger if he didn't look so tired. "They're beautiful."

"Come sit. What was it you wanted to talk about?"

They sat across from each other in the living room, she on the couch and he in an armchair. Sasha seemed to be casting around for the right beginning for a moment. "I haven't been doing… well."

"You look like you haven't been doing well."

He'd been staring at his hands, but he looked up at her now. "I know it's not your problem. And I'm not here to ask for your help; I don't know what I would expect you to do, really, I just…" He grimaced, his gaze lowering to his hands laced across his stomach again. "I don't know."

But looking at him, Wanda thought she did. She could see the uncertainty in his posture, hear it in his voice, and yet he'd pushed through it and come across town to see her. He probably felt pretty alone; he probably missed her. "You just need someone to talk to."

He peered back up at her through his lashes and nodded. "And I thought maybe you might too."

Something hardened in her a little at that. It might have been true, of course it was true, but she didn't want to talk to _him_ about it. "Let's just focus on you for right now."

His piercing eyes held their gaze for a moment but she ignored it, and eventually he gave in. "I feel like… this is gonna sound weird, but I feel like my brain is just...deteriorating, or something. I can't sleep, I'm blacking out, I just… feel like I'm going…"

"Crazy?" she supplied. He winced, but nodded.

"Not in a dangerous way."

"Have you talked about any of this with Vasya?"

"Yeah. He recommended I get more sleep."

"A difficult feat to accomplish when you can't sleep."

His lips twitched. "Exactly."

Blacking out… she didn't know exactly what he meant by that now, but she'd thought it sounded rather convenient, back when it had supposedly happened in London. Too ashamed to admit that he'd failed to save Pietro, so he claimed he couldn't remember what had happened and then had some sort of nervous breakdown to keep it up. Why would _he_ be so affected by it? It was her brother who had died, and she managed to keep functioning when she needed to, even though she was the one who was walking around missing half her self. Sasha must have just been putting it on, and it grated on her to no end.

But he really did look like shit.

"There's another thing…" He started again, looking even more uncertain, if that was possible. "It's maybe nothing, but I just gotta show you." He slipped his phone of out his pocket. "Maybe it's just cause I was so tired, that it rattled me the way it did."

"What is it?"

He tapped the screen a few times before passing it over to her. It was a screenshot of a drawing of two teenage boys. One of them was clearly Sasha when he was younger, and after a moment she recognized the other as one of the men who had been at that house in America, but also younger. Slimmer, more boyish. But she never forgot a face. She was trained not to.

She raised her eyes back to Sasha, who was looking back at her so expectantly she wondered if he was even breathing. She turned the screen back around to him, her finger next to the blond's face. "Who is that?"

The question did not seem to be what he expected. "What? I don't know. I mean, he's the guy who drew the picture. I was more focused on the other kid."

"Isn't that you?"

Sasha nodded emphatically, seeming pleased. This was the reaction he was looking for, apparently. "It looks just like me, doesn't it?"

She frowned. "Yes, but.." She moved the screen closer to him, still pointing at the blond. "You're telling me you don't know who this is?"

He seemed more perplexed than ever. "No. Do you?"

"Yeah! I mean, not really, I don't know much about him, but that's Steve, isn't it?"

Sasha, strangely, paled at that. "I didn't tell you his name was Steve."

What had gotten into him? "No, but I heard you call him that."

"I didn't say anything! I just showed you the picture!"

"Sasha, what are you talking about? I mean at the house in Lake George, you called him Steve!"

"The house _where_?"

The man sitting across from her looked so wildly lost that it gave her pause. A slick, uneasy feeling was forming in her gut. There'd always been something that didn't sit right with her about that weekend. She didn't like how no one would tell her what was really going on back there. Now that feeling that something was off was even stronger. "You don't remember that?"

The confusion slid away into something more neutral, more guarded. "Well, fuck. Something _else_? I swear, one of these times you're just gonna be messing with me."

She dropped her head into her hands. "So you really don't remember what happened in London."

"I told you I don't. You didn't believe me?"

Not really, no, she hadn't. God, Sasha really did have something wrong with him. It seemed a little weird, though, that he had no memory of the time in America that Vasya had specifically told her not to ask him about. She didn't like it.

"So I do actually know Steve G Rogers?"

"I don't know."

"And the two of us, me and you, we were both in Lake George? That's in New York, right? I think my old therapist might've mentioned that place. When was this?"

Wanda lifted her face out of her hands and took a deep breath. "I don't think I have enough information to properly answer your questions right now. I'll find out what I can, though, and we can talk about this later?"

Sasha's leg was bouncing up and down. He seemed agitated, and rightly so. "Really?"

She felt a little bad about how doubtful he sounded. "Really."

"Soon, though."

She nodded, and he stood up, his shoulders hunched. He wasn't even pressing the matter. She watched as he went to retrieve his shoes, and she realized that he probably didn't think he could demand anything of her. It was a jarring realization.

"See you soon, then. I'm...sorry. Have a good night."

She turned her gaze resolutely to the mug cupped between her hands. "Goodnight, Sasha."

* * *

Vasya's office was nice. It had big windows overlooking the city and plenty of open space, at least compared to Wanda's. She often preferred to hang out in his office when it wasn't entirely necessary for her to be in her own, so he wasn't surprised to see her at his door the next morning.

"Are you busy?"

"Just catching up on emails." He leaned back in his chair, motioning her in. "The Day of Remembrance and Sorrow really ought to be an official public holiday. Nobody wants to work."

She hummed her agreement, leaning up against the side of his desk with her arms crossed over her chest. "So I talked to Sasha last night."

"Oh?"

"He's not doing well, Vasya."

He grimaced sympathetically. "Yeah, seems like it."

"He looks like shit, says he can't sleep, that he blacked out the other day. He doesn't even remember being in America."

"Wanda!" He threw up his hands in frustration. "You're not supposed to be talking to him about that. It's classified."

"Well it doesn't matter, does it, because he doesn't remember it. You don't exactly seem surprised that he's forgotten an entire weekend."

Vasya shrugged. "He's been telling me he's having memory problems."

"It's just weird." She shook her head. "I don't know. I'm worried about him."

" _You're_ worried about him? Really?"

She ignored that. "Seems like he should see a doctor."

"They'd send him straight to a nut house."

Unfortunately he was probably right about that. Mental problems were not things that were treated lightly, it barely mattered what form they took. "Are you sure there's nothing you can tell me about what was going on that weekend? Everything Sasha does is classified, but we've always talked about it in the past."

Her boss and friend stood from his desk, pacing across the room. Walking often helped him get his thoughts in order, so she waited. "Actually, Wanda," he started after a few moments, his fingers tugging at his collar, "I find myself in a bit of a predicament right now. Maybe you can help me."

Her ears perked up at that. "Of course, if I can."

Was she imagining things, or was Vasya nervous right now? He seemed to be steeling himself for something. "Okay, oh boy, this is gonna be a long story." He folded his hands under his chin and stopped his pacing. "Wanda, Sasha is not who you think he is."

When he didn't say anything else, Wanda scoffed. "I think I've known Sasha long enough to know who he is. At least, as much as anyone does. Even he doesn't really know who he is."

"No, you're right. He doesn't. But I do."

* * *

"Damn, girl!" Steve bounced on his toes from his position from behind Natasha's head. "She's going for the 50s! This woman's a badass, you guys!" He called out to the gym at large.

"Shut up!" Nat's voice was strained as she started her reps on the bench, her arms trembling slightly. "You're gonna make me drop it on my chest from laughing."

"I am here to make sure that that does not happen," he said in his most serious voice. Nat cracked up and then grunted.

"Shut up!"

"I'm not even being funny, you're just in a mood. 7, 8… were you wanting to go 12?"

She breathed out harshly through her nose. "Yeah."

He counted her to the end of the set and then took the bar off her. "You're amazing. Especially after wearing your arms out like that."

"Yeah, they feel like noodles." Still lying on the weight bench, she reached out for her water bottle, which Steve handed to her. "And now I'm gonna take a little break, so you can check your phone like you've been itching to all morning."

Steve ducked his head. "Sorry."

She waved him off. "I wanna know too. Anything?"

He'd set his Youtube app settings to notify him if he got any comments or private messages, but he still found himself checking every chance he got. His hope had been that if Bucky hadn't been able to text him or had lost his number for some reason, seeing Steve reach out through his video would prompt him to make contact. There wasn't any username subscribed to his channel that seemed like it would belong to Bucky, making it difficult for Steve to try to make contact directly, so he'd thought this would be his best shot. Maybe the story he'd told would trigger some old memories, maybe it wouldn't, but still, he wanted to remind Bucky that he wasn't alone. That he wasn't abandoning him, in whatever subtle way he could. And even if Bucky didn't remember the things Steve was talking about, he wanted him to know about them.

There was still nothing. Maybe he wasn't able to reach out through Youtube any more than he was able to text.

"Negative?" Nat guessed from his face.

He shook his head. "Come on, Barnes, show yourself…"

* * *

Now Wanda was the one pacing. "So you're saying you abducted a random foreign soldier from a prison camp in Iraq, lied to him and said that he'd been fighting Chechen rebels, and then trained him to work with us?" And given her false intel about James Falsworth. She didn't appreciate being lied to about an assignment.

"He would've died, Wanda. They were doing terrible things to him. When I found him he wasn't anybody, so out of his mind he could barely even talk. No past, no identity, just some dog tags that, with a little research, proved that he had no family. I gave him a noble past, an identity, a family. An arm."

And took his dog tags, clearly. Maybe Wanda should have put it together. She'd known that Vasya had done a few stints in Iraq, helping defend Baghdad by supplying weapons, even as the second Chechen campaign was going on. And she'd known that he'd saved Sasha from some sick people who were doing experiments on POWs. Did it really matter, if he'd taken a Russian soldier out of a prison camp or an American one?

Maybe not, but it kind of seemed like it did.

"Aren't you worried, talking about this in your office?" She glanced instinctively to the camera in the corner of the ceiling.

He waved away the concern. "The only surveillance in here is video. Besides, they wouldn't do anything. This was 2003 when I did this, the FSB really needed someone like Sasha after Khattab was assassinated in Chechnya, and then especially after the whole Alexander Litvinenko catastrophe. The whole organization was under way too much scrutiny after that. If they were listening right now, they'd probably destroy the tape."

Khattab was a jihadist commander in the conflict in Chechnya who had been killed in 2002 by the FSB. But things hadn't really blown up for the agency until Alexander Litvinenko. Wanda had always thought there was something a bit racist about that. He had been a traitorous FSB officer who'd sought asylum in the UK until he was murdered, supposedly by a polonium-laced letter. British investigators had accused both Putin and the FSB chief of approving Litvinenko's murder, and the investigation was still going on, after years.

So yeah, Wanda could see the appeal of someone like Sasha. Someone who wasn't technically affiliated with them but would do what it took to keep the important people safe, even if it turned into dirty work. Since Sasha was working for Vasily Karpov, not the FSB, he and Vasya would be the only ones to take the fall if things were to go south. And in all honesty, 'the fall' hadn't been too bad for the main suspect of Litvinenko's murder, Andrei Lugovoi. The man had been made a national hero and a member of the Duma.

She wondered sometimes if that's what Vasya was picturing, when he thought about what might happen if Sasha was ever brought into a mess like the Litvinenko case. After all, he was an FSB bodyguard just like Lugovoi had been, if unofficially. But she thought maybe her boss hadn't really thought of all the implications of the agency having an off-the-books person to pin things on. They had made Lugovoi their champion because he was one of their own and they were too proud to be seen doing otherwise. She had a feeling that if Sasha ever fell under scrutiny, they would bury him.

"But if the Americans make a big fuss and claim him now, do you think your big officer friends would help you?" she asked dubiously.

"No." Vasya was pinching his brow like he had a headache. "I don't. That'd be my mess. Which is why we need to make sure the Americans don't make a big fuss."

"But how could we do that? We can't just kill them all."

He shook his head in agreement. "Any one of them might reasonably commit suicide on their own, but all four of them together? It's way too suspicious. Unless there was an accident, when they were all together…"

Wanda rolled her eyes. "Any real ideas? It seemed to me like your plan to get away with this relied upon everyone involved taking your threats very seriously for the rest of their lives."

"Right. Which is why we need a better plan. I was thinking," he shifted a bit in his seat before he cleared his throat and continued, "we could erase their memory of it."

She was ready to throw her hands up in exasperation, to get him to _be serious,_ but he just kept looking at her with this appraising look, like she was being tested. She stared at him. "You...think you can really do that."

"I can. And it's the only way to be sure."

"Oh, God." Her mind was racing through all the dots. Her grip tightened on the edge of the desk. "Sasha didn't just _lose_ his memory, did he."

"He did!" Vasya defended quickly. "At first. Because of what they did to him, to his head. But it didn't stick. I assumed it would, but he kept having these weird little moments, where something would come back, and then it would grow into a little more."

"You mean he was healing."

"Yeah." He nodded, as if equating healing to a problem was a normal thing to do. "I was able to explain it away for a little while, to fit some of it into something that could have been his life in Russia and to shrug my shoulders at the rest, but I knew it wouldn't work forever. So I put my studies to good use, and with some help from an old cognitive neuroscience professor, I figured out a way to target specific memories in the brain."

He sounded proud. Wanda didn't even know who she was talking to right now. "How many times did you do it to him?"

"Just a couple." He shrugged. "The first time took really well."

"He told me he feels like his brain is deteriorating." Her words were slow and carefully controlled.

"Yeah." His shoulders slumped slightly. "That's not good. He shouldn't just be dropping random short-term memories. I'm afraid tampering more might just make it worse, though."

"How could you do that, Vasily? He's one of our own. And I don't mean Russian, I mean… he's family."

"Oh now he's family again?" He raised his eyebrows. "After what he did to Pietro?"

"He didn't kill him," she said without much feeling.

"He didn't put a stop to it, either."

"Neither did I." The words felt like lead in her mouth. She had trouble swallowing.

Vasily's eyebrows raised even further, and he leaned back in his seat. "No, but that wasn't your job. Besides, he's only family because of what I did to him. Otherwise you never would have known him."

Of course that was her job. She was his twin sister, that was always her job. Even without weapons, she should have found a way. She should have subdued the assassin.

"I don't think I can do this by myself, Wanda. You're my best friend, I don't know who else to turn to. If I do nothing I'll go to prison for sure."

But if it went wrong, so would she. Caught up in an international trial. "I don't know about this, Vasya."

He sighed, nodded, and then stood slowly from his chair. "I hate to pull this card, because we're friends, but need I remind you that I am your boss?"

She scoffed. "What, are you going to fire me?"

He shrugged a shoulder. "I decide what your next assignment is, not you. If you're not happy with that system anymore I'm sure you can find employment elsewhere. No hard feelings."

He was standing close to her, with her back pressed to the edge of his desk, but she stared him down. Whatever feelings she had toward her oldest friend right now, she would not give him the impression that she was afraid of him.

"You would fire the person who now knows enough to get you thrown in prison?" Her voice was quiet but calm, and maybe she wouldn't actually _do_ it, but as long as they were throwing around empty words.

"Wanda." He shook his head with an amused little smile. "Have you forgotten already? I can make you not know anything very quickly. If it'd be easier for you, we can do that."

Her composure slipped, and she gaped at him. As much as Vasya was often full of idle threats, usually directed at other people, she leaned toward believing him on this one. He could be as pigheaded as they came and he always found a way.

"But I'd really prefer it and appreciate it if you would help me."

She couldn't find employment elsewhere. He knew that. This job was her life. Pietro had died serving their country, and she'd sworn to herself that she'd serve her until she died, too.

Damn it all. "What do you need me to do?"

* * *

Maybe he should make another video. Be a little less subtle. Steve was still debating with himself what might be the best way to proceed by the time they left the gym. He was so preoccupied with it that he only caught the end of what Natasha was saying as they pushed through the double doors.

"The last time I heard from her, she was telling me how she was getting over her addiction to pain pills. And now she's inviting me to her baby shower! Life's weird, huh?" Now Steve kind of wished he'd been listening. Before he could agree that life was weird, though, his phone started buzzing in his pocket.

"Sorry, hold on." It was an unknown number. He decided to answer it anyway. "Hello?"

"Steve Rogers? This is Scarlet."

Steve stopped on the sidewalk. Nat put her hand on his arm.

"I want to help you get back with your friend."


End file.
